Dark Horse
by Delta 9
Summary: You can't love someone until you can love yourself. But there is an exception to every rule. Daryl, Carol and Sophia are that exception. Too damaged and haunted by their past to have any idea of self-worth, in each other's eyes they are perfect. When Sophia tells Daryl a secret that endangers all of it, this misfit family will learn that nothing worth having comes without a fight.
1. Prologue

_**Part I**_

~*~ For A Doll ~*~

I was alone in the woods. I cried myself to sleep. I went hungry. I tried to find my way back.

Now here I am, sitting back in camp with my mom and everyone, my belly's full, I was a sleep before I was even in the RV. I was brought back but all of that; the crying and the hunger and feeling lost isn't going to stop. It won't end in the forest. It never started in the forest.

I'm alone in this. I can't tell anyone why I cry myself to sleep after I wake up shaking and in a cold sweat. I go hungry 'cause I get so nervous I can't keep food down. I try to find my way back to who I was before…

A chord tightens around my throat. It takes everything I have to keep still. To keep from screaming out loud.

_The foul smell of beer chased by cigarette smoke. _

My fingers curl into my shoulder.

_A fabric image of a flower, an ugly brown hole is burned in the middle. _

Everyone is moving around me, clearing up dishes from dinner. The chord keeps getting tighter. I try to push it all away. I can't do anything

_Burning._

The woodpile is a mess. It's uneven and the ends of the split logs stick out all over the place. I start at one end and pull out the thinner pieces and put them in their own pile off to the side. After I'm sure I've picked out all of the thin pieces, I start stacking all the other logs at the back, at the end further from the fire pit because the thick logs go on in to the fire later.

It's become a lot tidier. Stacked four logs high, it becomes an even bridge with a mostly flat face instead of the disorganized pile it used to be.

Out of the corner of my eye, I see someone come up behind me. I clumsily drop the halved, heavy log I was lifting to put on the last spot on top. My hand doesn't move fast enough, it gets sandwiched and crunched in the pile.

"Are you alright?" asks T-dog.

"Yes. It's fine," I cradle my hand against my chest. It's throbbing, but it's the kind that will pass after a few minutes. There will be a few scraps but they won't be any worse than the ones I got from my time in the woods.

"Hey Dog," Shane calls him.

T-Dog gives me one more look of suspicion before he goes over to where Shane and Andrea are stringing cans for our new camp on the edge like we had in the quarry. There are seven of them.

Keep it together! I scold myself.

I look around camp, hoping that no one else saw that.

Dale is up on his usual spot on RV, binoculars hanging around his neck. Glenn is with him.

Carl and his dad aren't back from their walk.

My mom's doing dishes while Lori dries them. She sandwiches a plate in amongst several cups instead of with the other plates even though there is room for it with the other plates. I fight the sudden urge to go over there and rearrange the whole damn drying rack.

Daryl noticed. He's watching me with a look I can't place. It's blank except for his eyes, interested and judging.

One of the last logs is a lot longer than all the others. I move it to the back of the pile but then there is five in one column. I try swapping out some logs in the middle section but wherever I put it, it sticks out horribly. It doesn't fit in anywhere.

It has too. I have to find a place for it.

"Here," Daryl holds out his hand.

I give him the odd log and he lays it across the chopping stump, wincing when he picks up the axe and has to set it down. He has fresh stitches in his side because I ripped up some old ones. I feel guilty about it. I told him not to pick me up but I didn't mean to hurt him.

Especially since he looked after me last night.

He could've hurt me if he wanted to. It would've been really easy for him, he can lift me up like I weigh nothing and I was too tired to put up much of a fight. But he was so nice.

He holds the piece steady with one hand and with one small swing of the axe in his other, he takes a chunk off the odd log and hands it back to me. I place it in the empty spot.

It fits perfectly with the others now.

It's a short relief.

Everyone is watching now, looking on with curiosity. They can sense that there is something wrong with me. Who takes the time to arrange something that is just going to get burned?

My throat tightens up again.

I'm different and I try hard to act normal, to not let the little things bug me but I can't help it. If I don't do something, I get torn apart.

"Thanks," I whisper to Daryl.

I walk quickly to our tent and duck inside. Once I close up the zipper. Once I'm alone. I stop fighting it and cry.

I sit on the floor beside my cot and cry and cry and cry.

When I'm all out of tears, I feel calm. I move up on to my cot, wrinkling the blue sleeping bag but I no longer care.

I can hear them talking on the other side of the canvas. The odd time a shadow walks by. They can't see me.

"Sophia," my mom starts calling, "Sophia,"

I grab my red sweater as an excuse for my absence and go back outside.

My mom is sitting beside the fire, I sit down beside her in a big lawn chair. She brushes my hair behind my hair the way she's done ever since I can remember.

As the fire starts to get bigger, more people are drawn over to its warmth. Until the only one missing is Glenn, whose on watch.

"I can't express how good it is to see you sitting there, Sophia," says Rick. He pats Daryl on shoulder.

"I told y'all I'd find her," Daryl says.

Everyone laughs and agrees that he did say that or agree that it is good to see me here.

They wouldn't be saying that if they knew. If they knew what happened to me. They wouldn't want me here.

People don't like dirty things.


	2. Chapter 1

Disclaimer: I don't own any of the characters, ownership goes to Robert Kirkman, Frank Darabont and Glen Mazzara. As well I don't own any of the songs I will be posting either.

A huge thank you to my very good friend and fellow writer, Ihasabukkit for helping me with the character interactions in this chapter. If you love reading well written fanfics with characters acting in perfect canon. I urge you to go read _Three Trees_

* * *

_I heard the church bells from afar. But we found each other in the dark._

- City and Color. We Found Each Other In The Dark.

* * *

_My stomach hurt. I'd had nothing to eat but a handful of berries. My mouth was very dry too, my tongue was swollen up and it felt like it was too big for my mouth. My feet were getting sore but I kept on walking. The forest wouldn't go on forever. _

_A half dead tree stood out over the thousands of them. The right side of its branches was leafless. It was probably sick, had some tree disease inside was slowly killing it. I seen it happen before. The tree in our yard started losing all its leaves and no matter how much I watered it, it didn't grow anymore. _

_As I got closer to it I saw that a strip of bark had been torn clean off from top to bottom. Like a giant tabby cat had used it as a scratching post. Lightening had hit it. I touched the burn scar, the wood was smooth not like the bark. It was going to get sick being all exposed like that. _

_I ducked under its branches as I went around it. There were tiny little buds on it. _

_All of a sudden my insides got all cramped up, I sat down at the base of the tree and looked up the branches. _

_I didn't get how it could still be growing. Nature's funny that way, I s'pose. _

_The wind rustled through the leaves, making that whispering noise. _

_It was my fault that I was stuck out here. If only I hadn't wandered off. _

_I buried my head into my knees and cried. I didn't want to but couldn't help it anymore. _

_No one was looking for me._

"Daryl," Andrea brought him out of the forest and back into the present. She held out a cardboard box to him. "Can you find room for this in one of the cars?"

He looked at the box and then at her, grinding his jaw like he was thinking about what to say, then took it from her wordlessly.

The unexpected weight of it tugged at his tender side. The discomfort flashed across his face.

"You alright?" Andrea asked and went to grab the box for him.

"Fine," he growled, straightening up.

She withdrew her hands but kept watching him with a concerned look. They both knew that Daryl wasn't fine with this at all.

The tents were deflated and the Winnebago was finally running after Dale's fine tuning, filling the air with a steady rumbling and the occasional puff of blue smoke. It was as ready as it would ever be to go to Fort Benning.

Rick had assured them that they weren't going to go far from the Greene's farm after he said that they were going to with Herschel's wishes and get off his land. But Shane was pushing Fort Benning harder than ever now and why would the other's choose hanging out in the open over going to a potential safe haven.

But what about Sophia? Carol's little girl was still out there. Hungry, cold and very, very scared. The only thing keeping her going might be the hope that they were out there looking for her. And here they all were on another day with their thumbs and heads clear up their asses.

Daryl looked over at the woods. About three quarters of the way into that tree line was a roughly carved dirt trail that he had taken every single day he went out. He should've been on it today. Someone should have.

"Hey Daryl, when you're done, could you bag up some of the tents?" asked Rick.

"You got it," Daryl readjusted the box in his arms so it wouldn't pull against his sore side so much and fixated on Rick with a steely glare, "gawd knows you got a million other things to be doin'."

"Thank you," Rick said curtly.

He did have enough to do keeping Lori calmed down and from keeping her from going to talk to a devastated Greene family and make things worse for them. Rick would bet his left kidney that explaining the plan again to Daryl would only open up a conversation for an argument. Daryl simply wanted to fight.

"Yeah, yer welcome," Daryl growled and went to go find a space for the box.

The vehicle with the most remaining trunk space was Carol's Cherokee. Daryl hefted the box on to the tailgate and slid it to the back, over the stark paperback of a photograph lying loose. Written in blue pen, _Roo 4 months. _

Curious, Daryl flipped the photo over. It was of Carol, only her hair was shoulder length and her features were softer, not as hard as they had been lately. She wasn't looking at the camera, she only had eyes for the baby nestled on her shoulder. Given the feathery scrap of blonde hair, it had to be Sophia.

The photo had picked up some gritty dirt, Daryl very carefully brushed the specks off so it wouldn't get scratched up. Due to the closeness of the shot, nothing else was really in the picture except the mother and daughter.

Were they sitting in a rocking chair? He liked to think that they were. That Carol would rock the chair back and forth with her toe while humming or singing to her daughter. Sophia would coo or make whatever noise babies made.

"What is it?" Carol in the flesh snuck up on him.

"I ah was um packing up and just found it in the back," Daryl muttered sheepishly, handing the photo out to her.

Carol plucked the photo from his fingers and stared at it with a far off look.

"Oh, my little Roo. That's what my sister nicknamed her because she always had to be carried, would make such a fuss if you put her in a stroller so I had one of those baby pouches and carried her around like a kangaroo," Carol brought the photo closer to her face, "ugh I look crap. I don't think I slept at all during her first year. Sophia was so colicky… "

Her voice trailed off as she pulled a navy blue scrapbook from the side. Sophia's baby album, where this picture belonged, was somewhere in the car but she knew she wouldn't be able to look at it without breaking down. Carol couldn't do that in front of Daryl or should she say to Daryl. He had done so much and he was taking all of this bad enough.

_Truth is, what else I got to do. _She thought about their talk by the little duck pond earlier.

She didn't think for a second all of this was out of boredom. Daryl could amuse himself hunting for food. It was something personal. It had to be. Was because of what happened to Merle? Andrea had told her that Daryl had gotten lost in the backwoods when he was a kid, was that why he cared so much?

Carol took a deep breath and opened the scrapbook to any old page to tuck the photo safely away. The second she did so; Daryl leaned in just enough for the movement to distract her. He, however, was looking at their last Christmas pictures so captivated, you'd think he'd never seen any before.

That was almost the truth. He'd had his picture taken of course, but mostly in his adult years. Daryl didn't have any family photos. He had never given it any thought until now. There was something special about them.

Carol slammed the scrapbook shut and put it back in the car with shaky hands that she berated herself for. Daryl caught her eye, biting his lip.

"I'm ok," she said softly and patted his arm, before walking off to go find something to do to help. Carol didn't see him slip a photo out of the album and put it in his backpack before he walked off in the opposite direction.

_It's ok. _Daryl had mouthed to her earlier with a rifle still smoking in his hands outside the barn.

All those walkers from the barn had been from around this area, a sampling of what was out there. What chance did Sophia have?

Carol started untying the clothesline from the two trees.

She couldn't remember the last time she hugged her baby girl or told her that she loved her. She knew it had been recently but she couldn't remember the details and it was killing her.

A particular strong beam of sun hit her as she stepped out of the shade of the tree with the clothesline.

_She's in God's hands now. _

Shane was emptying a jerry can into the Hyundai Tucson, Rick circled the car looking at the tires. They were full and the tread on them was deep, they must be new. They'd be good in the winter.

"We really ain't gonna go far?" asked Daryl.

"Yes Daryl," Rick answered tiredly. He gave Shane a keep-quiet look. Daryl was also eyeing up his partner, silently daring him to do the opposite and say something.

"Where 'bouts?" asked Daryl.

"Haven't figured that out yet."

"Could ya give me a guesstimate?"

"Farther down the road west, towards the town. Glenn said from what he could see when he went to the pharmacy that there's a few farms that are look like they might be untouched."

Shane scoffed and ran his hands over the stubble on his head. Rick prepared for a fight. But Daryl nodded, apparently satisfied with the answer and left them.

They packed up the tents in to the Hyundai and a few in the RV. Dale, T-Dog, and Carl had bagged them into their airtight sacks.

"I still don't see why you don't want to stick around here," Shane started again, "We have enough gas to get halfway to Fort Benning. We'll be able to find the other half on the road. We can go, so why are we staying?"

"For Lori, for my baby, for Sophia. That a good enough list for you," stated Rick.

"You think a refugee center won't have a medical team. Real doctors, Rick. Not a country vet."

"That is if there is a refugee center there. What if there's not and we drag Lori all that way for nothin'. Swim toward the closest ship not farther out to sea, remember? This is real. It's worth the fight."

Shane ripped open the drivers door on the Tucson. "Guess I'll go scout out one of these ships then huh?"

In the rearview mirror he saw Andrea wave for him to wait for her. She hopped in the passenger side eagerly.

"You still wanna run away together?" Shane joked.

"I'm along for the ride," she smiled devilishly.

Rick watched the dust trail rise up as the silver car ripped down the road. He walked through the camp or what was left of it, which wasn't much. He swept through it like he was leaving a hotel room. Rick did notice that something was missing. He walked across the field in a power walk to the stable.

There it was.

The motorcycle was tucked into one of the stalls, along with Daryl's pack and a photo of a lost girl holding a white goat.

* * *

A squirrel perched on a swaying tree branch looked down at the peculiar creature lying on the ground.

Straw hair matted in muddy tangles. The skin was a sickly sallow. The grimy blue t-shirt rose and fell a little with each dragging breath. It was lying on its stomach, then ever so slowly it pulled its legs underneath it and slowly stood up.

With a warning chatter, the squirrel darted up the tree. With hazy eyes, the peculiar creature watched its bushy tail disappear in to the treetops. But the squirrel didn't lose sight of it until it stumbled off, snapping twigs and rustling the bush as it went.

The horse's ears flicked forward and perked up attentively, he turned his head to look off in the brush with a quiet whinny.

Daryl put the brakes on the horse with a pull on the reins. All he heard was a squirrel chirping in the background. He nudged the horse back to walking but kept an eye on the spot they had both been looking.

From between the trees Sophia staggered like a sick animal, weaving from left to right, not aware of anything around her.

He'd be looking for her for so long, called her name more times than they had ever talked, it was a shock to finally see her.

She collapsed. Just went over on her side like she'd been shot.

Daryl dismounted and led the Tennessee walker over to the girl. He couldn't believe it. Sophia was lying right next to a Cherokee rose bush.

The pure white rose was the first thing Sophia saw when she opened her eyes. She found herself once again lying on the ground but this time she was being held. Daryl Dixon from camp was cradling her. A dark brown horse looked at her from over Daryl's shoulder. She liked horses.

The girl was a mess. Her clothes were damp and she smelled like a wet dog. There was a big hole taken out of her shoulder that had left a bloodstain on her shirt. It was scabbed over well enough that it couldn't be fresh so he didn't worry that it was bite. Mentally, Daryl didn't think she was making heads or tails of any of this, as she looked up at him in an exhausted daze.

But she was alive. Daryl still could not believe he was sitting here with her. The look on Carol's face when he rode up with her…

_What are you waiting for? _Daryl interrupted his daydream.

Dark storm clouds were blowing in overhead. They had to get back.

When Daryl went to scoop her up, Sophia pushed against him weakly and tried to crawl away.

Sophia was going to be heavier than that box he was struggling with before. But she wasn't going to be able to get in the saddle on her own in her condition. However if she was going to put up a fight, he was going to lose a few stitches.

She solved the problem when she got to her feet and walked over to the horse. Beneath all the dirt was a smile when the horse sniffed at her filthy rainbow shirt.

"This 'ere's Memphis, he's sure-footed and more importantly very calm," said Daryl quietly.

Making a cradle with his hands, Daryl gave her a leg up and then he swung himself up behind her and with a kick to Memphis they were on their way. "Let's git ya home, Sophia."

"Sophia Lynn," corrected Sophia. "I always liked it 'cause it's like Loretta Lynn. You ever seen _The Coal Miner's Daughter_?"

" No, heard a it though,"

"It's all about Loretta Lynn's life, she was really poor and her husband bought her a seventeen dollar guitar and she taught herself how to play and she became a country music star. It's one of my favorite movies. The other one is _Hairspray_, you probably haven't seen that one."

Daryl prepared himself for a very long ride back but after that Sophia was quiet. She

sat hunched over in the saddle, more often than not petting Memphis' musty brown neck. Any slant on the trail would pitch her

"Ya can sit back," Daryl wrapped an arm around his passenger and rested her against him. "

Sophia didn't take to it and leaned forward again. Daryl tried hooking her back a little while later, she stayed this time, putting all of her weight on his sore side of

He thought he could handle it. A minute of jouncing on horseback proved him wrong.

"Yer gonna have to sit on my other side," Daryl shifted her over. Sophia compliantly lolled over to his other side with a small whimper.

Memphis kept looking behind them towards his home as they got close. But Daryl was taking Sophia straight to her mother. Everything else, picking up his stuff and taking the horse back was coming second.

The sky grew even dark and the wind picked up. Thunder rumbled as it began to spit. They were getting caught in a storm but a sleeping Sophia was dead to the world.

"Sophia. 'ey Sophia Lynn" Daryl shook her, "c'mon kid. "

She wouldn't wake up.

It occurred to Daryl that he didn't know exactly where the group was, just had a guesstimate but they didn't have time to look around right now. Not being able to wake Sophia up was adding to the pressure.

Daryl turned Memphis around and kicked him into a canter. They breached the trees into a clearing. The Greene's farm was a speck in the distance.

"I took a bullet an' a arrow lookin' for you. You hold on."

* * *

Author Introduction

Hello all. I am Delta 9, beloved (and obviously egotistically) author of Whiskey & Cakesters, and other (Great) stuff. After the premiere of the prologue I noticed some familiar faces which is great because I love all of you, (except for that guest I had to yell at, but enough with the glory day) Anyway if you're here on authorship basis, I just have to point out this is an M rated story.

A big thank you to all who reviewed, I loved hearing your predictions and interest in this story: piratejessieswaby, 6747, Ihasabukkit, Effigy, deelove1, Emberka-2012, sammyjase, jemlou, Narnian at Heart, LittleSlytherin394. 

Next time on Dark Horse:_ Especially since he looked after me last night… he was so nice. _Finding Sophia may have been the easiest part for Daryl.


	3. Chapter 2

_Maybe it's a little too early to know if this is gonna work. All I know is you're sure looking good in my shirt _

Keith Urban. You Look Good In My Shirt.

* * *

Her grandmother use to tell her myths from the old country, she told her once about the Black Dog. It was a death omen that took the form of a big black dog with red eyes. For days after her birth mother died, a thick sadness clung in the air like smoke and Maggie blamed it on the Black Dog silently roaming the hallways.

Once more The Black Dog had found way back into the house to refill the air with a tense and gloomy feeling.

The three of them, Beth, Jimmy and Maggie sat on Beth's bed, clustered together like little kids. Beth was curled up in the middle, Jimmy was sitting on the end of the bed with Beth's feet in his lap. Maggie sat beside her little sister, just like the night when Annette and Shawn had turned …

Vivid images of Annette's slashed cheek, those yellowed eyes frozen in place as she looked up at the tip of the sickle sticking through her forehead played in her mind.

Maggie should go check on her dad.

_Pat, pat, pit, pat, pitter, pit, pat. _The rain began a sporadic rhythm against the window. From across the washed out world outside shown from the second storey window, a horse and rider came charging up to the house. Despite the distance, Maggie could tell that it was one of their horses but the rider was not.

She grabbed her sister's sweater hanging on the bedposts and pulled one arm on as she walked across the room to the door. She shrugged the other arm on as she walked down the hallway to the stairs. Maggie slipped on a pair of shoes but didn't tie them up before walking out the door. Fresh, yet nippy air greeted her outside and Maggie zipped up the sweater as she stepped out in to it. The rain had picked up, dotting the navy blue sweater with darkened spots.

"What the hell are you doing here?" She yelled over top of the building wind.

Memphis had slowed to an easy lope. His rider was Daryl. She couldn't help but be angry by his presence. Her dad was devastated, Maggie had never seen him like this in her life and it was scaring the hell out of her. Beth was barely holding on and she didn't think Patricia was doing any better, she had more or less locked herself in her room. It was all done by his group and he had been a part of it.

Maggie grabbed Memphis' lead where it was connected under his halter and looked over the cinch on the saddle to make sure it wasn't too loose or too tight needlessly. Maggie knew Daryl was fully competent with horses. It was asking permission he had no clue about.

"He's fine, it's her I'm worried 'bout," Daryl dismounted; Sophia tumbled out of the saddle without his support. He somehow managed to catch her before she hit the dirt, which cost him a stitch. "She conked out a while back, haven't been able to get her up since."

"Ya got her?" Maggie hadn't noticed Sophia until now.

"Yeah, yeah. I got 'er" Daryl addressed the peculiar creature in his arms.

_I found you. _It still hadn't completely sunk in yet even though he was holding her.

A white hot flash of lightening lit up the sky momentarily. A second later thunder snapped right above them. It was enough to make a liar out of Daryl and wake Sophia up. A subtle little opening of her eyes up to the stormy sky and Daryl's grey shirt. She normally didn't like being picked up but right now she didn't have the energy to care.

"C'mon," Maggie clicked her tongue and began to lead Memphis back to the stable. Daryl stayed rooted to the spot holding the no longer lost girl looking absolutely lost himself. "You waitin' for a invitation. Take her inside."

_Inside? _Sophia questioned. Right as the word sunk in, she was being carried up some steps. There was a porch light with moths flying into it over and over again because the bugs thought that they had found the sun. She couldn't keep her eyes open and found herself slipping off to sleep. Then she felt herself really slipping out of Daryl's hold. A knee-jerk reaction caused her to grab on to the strap of the crossbow slung across his chest. The stirrup of the crossbow jabbed him in the back of the head.

"Whoa, whoa, whoa I gotcha ya," Daryl said, re-tightening his grip.

Apparently opening the front door was going to require some skill. Daryl tried to grip and effective turn the doorknob without in anyway letting go of Sophia. Yuppie newlyweds did it all the time. What was the trick to this? He thought about Carol's kangaroo baby pouch. She must have got that to free up her hands and that was when Sophia was a little runt of a thing, now she was a half-grown, gangly mosquito. It didn't help that his whole side were quite sore and bleeding, compliments of the wayward troublemaker in his arms who was starting to squirm. He had pulled an arrow out of his side to take out a walker but this was impossible.

"Could you get the door?" he asked Sophia.

The door opened up into the house that she hadn't seen the outer shell of. She looked around at her new surroundings. Wood floors, some old style love seats with a wooden trim around the top and matching end tables. Back through an archway was dining table and at the end there was kitchen. The only one around was a black and white portrait of a woman. There was no one from their group.

_Where's mummy? _

Daryl carried her down the hallway. There was a lamp she hadn't seen from her initial view before.

_Where's he taking me? _

Unable to answer either question, Sophia began to squirm and kick. Daryl tried to keep a hold on her. The violent contortion of him trying to do so caused at least three stitches to split open and he had no choice but to drop her.

"Argh," Daryl gasped, clutching his bleeding side. "Ya lil-"

Sophia had pressed herself into the wall across from him and he could practically see her heart all but beating out of her chest.

"_She'd run in the other direction." _Shane's voice echoed in his head.

Obviously Shane had been dead wrong about finding Sophia alive but he was right about one thing. Sophia was afraid of him.

"_You shut her up or I will." _His own voice echoed. Guess she sort of had a reason to be.

So despite the pain she'd caused him, Daryl bit back about five very harsh words for her and told himself to be nice.

"I want my mom," Sophia whined. "Where's my mom?"

"She's close by. Once the storm let's up a bit, I'll go get her," He wasn't lying. He just left out the part where he didn't know exactly where Carol was.

They went into the front room, and listened to the storm; how the rain pounded against the house, the wind rattled the walls and every minute or so thunder deafened them to the other noises. Daryl stood by the window and watched the storm for a while and every so often looked over at Sophia. She had started off sitting up but now was propped against the armrest, curled up into a ball. He couldn't help but feel for the poor girl, she had been lost in the woods for days, now she was in strange place with a guy who yelled at her for crying once.

He'd always assumed Carol would be there for the post found stage so he never thought about what he would do with her other than bring her back. It did click in his head that her clothes were damp.

Daryl grabbed the blanket folded the top of a recliner on the other side of the couch. Sophia pushed herself up and gave him a distrustful look when he laid it over her.

"Jeez, tryin' to be nice," he muttered going back to his post by the window.

_Being nice is a bad trick, _She thought._ What are you really up to?_

She kept an eye on him all the time she was able to keep them open. When it became nearly impossible to do that, Sophia sat up so she would stop falling asleep.

"Why isn't she here?" asked Sophia. It was out of the blue to Daryl. She had been working on it for a while.

_Why did you bring me here?_

"Herschel, the man that owns this place kicked us off this morning because Shane killed all the geeks he was keeping in the barn."

The explanation raised more questions to someone who hadn't been around for the past couple of days.

"After you went missing we all went into the woods lookin' for ya. We split up after we went to this church and Carl accidently got shot. He's fine, was up running around at target practice the other day. The man that shot him brought Rick and Shane here and Herschel saved him. Don't know too much about it, I wasn't here that night. Me, your ma, Andrea, and Dale stayed out on the highway in RV. The next morning we had to leave the highway but we left you a message saying we'd come there everyday so stay put and we left some supplies. A whole jar of peanut butter, yer ma said you love the stuff. So while Carl healed up, we camped out there in the yard and went out there everyday lookin' for ya." Daryl stretched the truth again.

When Daryl was unable to go out yesterday, Shane and Andrea had taken over so at least someone had gone out. But in his opinion they hadn't gone far enough or spent enough time looking. It's not like it mattered now, Sophia was safe and semi sound.

"Somehow Glenn found out that Herschel was keeping his dead wife and stepson in the barn, along with a dozen of his dead neighbors, he thought the geeks are sick. Shane busted open the barn door and we had no choice but to take them out. I could understand why he did it, I wanted to too but Rick's got the grand scheme all figured out, if he thought it was a bad idea we shouldn't have done it"

Recounting the past brought up an old question. "Couple days back, I found a house with a little bed made up in tha pantry, was that you?"

Sophia nodded her head slowly. Daryl made a mental note to mention that to Shane, bringing the I-told-you-so count to two.

"Why didn't ya stay there?"

_I wanted too. Actually I thought I could live there. I dreamt that I could fix up the place; dust the counters and tables and put some of those white flowers outside in the vase on the top shelf. It'd be just like out of a story, just me living in this little old house in the woods. When it got dark, I learned that it was a ghost story. There is no such things as ghosts I told myself again and again as I stared out into the empty kitchen from the cupboard I was lying in. I could hear them walking across the wooden floor, and I heard them whispering. I couldn't make out what they were trying to tell me. I could hearing them crying. An unspeakable evil had taken place in that house. _

Visibly distressed, Sophia started digging into her injured shoulder. She was about to say something when Maggie walked in soaking wet slamming of the door behind her. She dropped his pack in the hall and shot Daryl a nasty look before rounding a corner, disappearing out of sight. They continued listening to the thunder and the rain.

"Ya hungry?" asked Daryl.

Sophia shook her head, staring down at the floor or she had her eyes closed. From his angle he couldn't tell. He didn't understand how she could not be hungry, she should be starving, probably had a bad case of nerves right now. Maybe in a little awhile, if they were still stormed in, he'd make her something to eat anyway and see if he could coax her in to eating.

"Where's the bathroom?" asked Sophia.

"There's one upstairs." Daryl answered.

Sophia slid off the couch and made her way over to the stairs. He shouldn't have been surprised at the movement; she wouldn't ask about the whereabouts of the bathroom for the hell of it.

"Do ya need some help?" he asked as she took on a few steps with a white knuckled grip on the banister. There was something wrong in the way she walked. She was favoring her left leg and wouldn't put either foot completely flat.

"Nu-uh," she answered, looking down at her feet as she enacted the saying one step at a time.

He followed on her very slow heels upstairs and waited outside the bathroom door.

The toilet flushed. The sound of water running and then there was an audible _thunk_. Daryl knocked on the door and pressed his ear against it to hear the weakest of answers. No response.

The water going was obviously the shower, and the thunk sounded like something hitting the bottom of a bath tub, something like a body. Daryl went to open the door when he figured that she would probably be naked.

"Maggie!" shouted Daryl down the hall. "Maggie!"

No answer.

"Patricia!"

Was it too much too ask that someone answer him?

Daryl pounded again on the door. Maybe she hadn't heard him before over the sound of the shower. "Sophia, hey Sophia."

He was going to have to go in there and make sure she was ok. Why did she have to do this anyway? Why couldn't she have wanted a sandwich instead? That he could handle.

_It's not like you haven't seen a girl naked before. _He comforted himself.

_No I haven't. I've seen women naked. _

_Same thing. Only smaller and with less hair. _

_I'm sick, so very very sick for thinking that. _

Steam embraced him when he opened the door. Much to his surprise, Sophia was conscious. Well she was sitting up for the moment, letting the water beat down on her. She didn't screech any opposition to his presence, she didn't even raise her head when he walked over to the bathtub. More preoccupied with protecting her modesty than logic, he threw a towel around her before turning off the showerhead.

Sophia coughed and yakked up what was probably once blackberries on the towel and also on herself.

"For god sakes," he muttered, getting on his knees.

Daryl turned the faucet back on and splashed some water on her face, wiping the blueish goo off her chin with edge of the towel.

The easy way out would be to pick her up and pray to God she could get her clothes back on by herself. Shivering, she looked at him through plastered locks of hair dripping grey water. Watered down she smelled even more like a wet dog. Sophia was miserable.

"I've gone through too much to let ya drown in the bath, ok?" Daryl took the towel from her, she didn't want to let it go at first but eventually he was able to unhinge her fingers from the fabric.

"Tell me when its warm enough" He turned the taps and adjusted it, holding Sophia's hand under the rushing water like the bloody miracle worker. Sophia acted like a mute and never did say, Daryl guessed it was getting to hot when she started going pink and dialed it back.

The bathroom had to be the girl's, there was a thousand and one colorful bottles lined up around the tub. Daryl scanned over the stupid named products and grabbed one. He poured some pink sludge into the water. Foamy white bubbles sprouted up instantly, giving Sophia a nice little cover. Bubble bath had never been so practical.

Daryl had never given anyone a bath before, not that what he was really doing here, he was just going make sure she didn't fall asleep while she had a nice soak to knock the dirt off. But he figured there would be nothing wrong with helping her wash out her matted hair, pretty sure he saw a bit of a twig sticking out of there. Sophia cringed when he reached for a bottle of shampoo.

"It's ok, ya don't need to be afraid no more, it's all over now." Daryl spoke softly, he slowly grabbed a blue shampoo bottle and poured some into his palm. "We'll get ya all cleaned up for yer ma."

Despite herself, Sophia couldn't help but like the feeling of Daryl's hands massaging her scalp. Daryl got the idea that the kid maybe enjoying herself a little bit when a quiet blessed out expression crossed her face. "Y'know the few times I go get a hair cut, I really like when they wash my hair. Don't tell no one though."

Rather then have her lie back in the water, he rinsed the suds out with a plastic vase that held a hundred hairbrushes. (Most definitely the girl's bathroom.)

"Can I clean yer shoulder a bit?" Daryl picked up a weird orange spongy ball thing, Sophia looked at him like he was asking to clean the wound with sandpaper, "just your shoulder, that's it, that's all."

If truth be told, she never gave verbal consent before he started taking small swipes at the torn skin, clearing away the mud easily. It was strange it was like a rash but without any actual skin irritation save for the faint red scratches around the edge of the scabbed area where she had been picking away at it.

He let Sophia soak in the tub a little longer as he surveyed his own damage in the mirror. He had lost all but one lonely little stitch. The cause was humming to herself innocently while he pulled the useless bits of medical thread out of his skin.

"You almost done?" asked Daryl.

The water had cooled off, the bubbles had dissolved to show how much dirt had come off her, a lot, and her fingertips were very wrinkly. So yes, she was done.

"'Kay I'm gonna stand here with my eyes shut an' you take my hand if ya need it," Daryl did as he said and held out his hand with his eyes shut.

In two seconds, a slippery hand landed in his. The support made it a lot easier for her to step over the high sides of the tub. Sophia cocooned herself up in a fluffy blue towel and sat down on the floor. Daryl knelt down by her again and pulled the last towel off the rack. Somehow it caused the whole towel rack to fall right out of the wall. The part that held the rod on one side landed right on Sophia's head. She cried out in pain.

"Shit, ya ok?"

"Yeah," Sophia said, rubbing her head where she got hit.

He dried her hair with the last remaining dry towel. It occurred to him after as Sophia at him with wide eyes that she probably wanted to get dressed. Putting her clothes back on her would put the same old dirt on her.

"You sit here and I'll go find ya somethin' ta wear,"

_He vanished, like he had never been there at all. The air was cold on my skin but inside my body was warm. Not like hot when I laid on the rock to try dry off after I fell in the creek, it was a comfortable warmth like the type you get when you drink hot chocolate. _

"It's mine but it's clean," Daryl threw his pin-striped purple, sleeveless shirt over her head. As he suspected on him it was a shirt, on her it was a dress. A bit of a low cut dress. He did the buttons up to the top. Sophia was the doll Daryl never had growing up. Because he was a boy and had no idea what to do with them.

From her discarded cargo pants she snagged something pink with little white polka dots. Her panties, Daryl realized. Sophia twined her underwear around her feet and tried to put them on without sitting up which more impossible than holding someone and opening a door.

"Yer a right proper young lady, ain't cha?" Daryl closed his eyes again, they had a good system going. Sophia got herself decent which was much easier to do standing up. She tapped him on the shoulder when she was good to go.

"My feet hurt," stated Sophia tiredly.

To get a good look at them, Daryl set her up on the large wooden dresser. The pads of her feet explained her whole way of walking. They were dried and cracked with a few blisters on her heels. A thin line of blue encircled a slightly swollen ankle.

"Twist yer ankle?"

"There was a walker hiding on the ground, and it tried to grab me and I fell."

"What did you do to your shoulder?"

"dunno," mumbled Sophia, scratching at the area.

The first thing Maggie saw when walked into the bathroom was Daryl wrapping Sophia's ankle up in a tensor bandage. Little puddles trailed to the bathtub looked like it was full of dishwater, it was going to leave a grime film when emptied. All of the towels were on the tile floor along with the towel rack. If she knew a hurricane was going to rip through her bath

"Got it covered now," Daryl rolled his eyes. Where was she when he was hollering her name? "Ya have anythin' for her shoulder?"

Since he didn't give any other details, Maggie moved in to look at Sophia's afflicted shoulder. Daryl pulled at the collar to give Maggie a better look. Sophia came to life, she grabbed Daryl's hand, wrenching two fingers the wrong way as hard as she could, which was actually pretty damn painful. He let go with a muffled yelp.

_What the fuck! _Daryl had no idea what he had done. When he looked back to Sophia, how anxious she looked, he knew that he had crossed some line.

Maggie gave him a puzzled look. She opened a drawer, closed it and then opened another drawer.

"Hydrocortisone," said Maggie.

Daryl snatched the tube from her. He had a theory that Sophia might have freaked out because she felt too crowded by people she didn't know. She knew him better than Maggie so he was going to continue caring for her and make damn sure he moved slowly. Sophia was on edge, he could feel all the tendons tightened up in her shoulder as he rubbed the cream in.

"I'm gonna put her in the bed downstairs," Daryl explained his next move as he finished up fixing her.

"Alright," Maggie said.

"Was not asking," Daryl growled, his tone changed when he turned to Sophia, "now you, young lady have worn out my patience plus I'm sore an' cranky, so don't fight me."

He carried her back downstairs into the guest room. Sophia lightly hung on to him and seemed all to eager to crawl out of his arms on to the queen sized bed.

"What the Greene's lack in hospitality, they make up for comfy beds."

"It's got a electric blanket," Maggie said, coming in behind them. Hopefully she hadn't heard his last remark. Then again maybe she should've heard it.

A bit confused, Daryl looked at the blanket Sophia was huddled underneath, Maggie showed him a little control panel with attached to the mattress.

"The heating pad's on top of the mattress, that's how you turn the temp up, that's down. Make sure she don't cook." Maggie showed him the workings of the electric blanket.

"Now we're just spoilin' ya," Daryl said to Sophia.

She felt everything that she had tried to pretend to in the woods. The bed was very comfy and was massaging her stomach with an even heat and Daryl's shirt was pretty soft too and didn't stick to her like hers had near the end. The rain still beating away outside made everything seem ten times better even if it kept her from her mom.

"Maggie said you ripped your stitches," Patricia drifted in with a first aid kit in hand, already eyeing up the bloodstain decorating his ribs.

Daryl looked over at Sophia. Getting all the dirt off her showed how discolored her skin really was. "Lookit her first."

"She really dehydrated, gonna have to give her a IV," Patricia gave a diagnosis after five minutes of looking Sophia over.

Sophia was more aware than she looked. The mention of this IV scared her. All to well, Daryl remembered a crying Carl and Sophia during the blood test at the CDC and how he had to subtly excuse himself from the room.

"I want my mom," Sophia whined through chattering teeth and wet cheeks. When Patricia stuck her with the needle she cried out in such a sharp note, Daryl felt a stab in his gut.

"Sorry, honey I didn't get a vein," said Patricia, carefully withdrawing the needle. "One more time."

One more time turned into two more times. Sophia cried harder and harder every time.

"Quit torturing her," Daryl couldn't take it anymore.

He took the needle from her. For the size of it felt heavier in his hand. He didn't want to do this at all but she was going to have tracks by the time Patricia got through with her.

"Here Sophia, lookit the horses" Daryl handed her a coffee table book on horses from the nightstand. She looked up at him silently asking him why was he doing this to her. He tapped the crook of her clean elbow a few times with two fingers in hopes to raise a vein on her so he would only have to do this once. Daryl pointed at the glossy first page of the book, "look at all those horses."

The picture of a herd of horses in a vivid green valley distracted Sophia, Daryl sunk the needle into her as quick as he could with screwing it. Despite his efforts she cried out in pain but it was in for good this time.

Patricia gave him very skeptical look. Obviously doubting that he would've learned that in a proper medical environment. She was right. For that, Daryl could swear she was being rough with him as she redid the stitches he lost. He didn't say anything and looked at the book with Sophia.

"I'm kinda hungry now," said Sophia, shortly after Daryl pulled the tube out of her arm when the IV bag was empty.

"Oh you are, are ya? What do you want? There's peaches and jerky and garden vegetables, got carrots and tomatoes." Daryl listed off what he could remember.

"Tomatoes?" That perked her interest, "Could you fry them?"

"Been a bachelor my entire of life, fryin' shit is my specialty. You sit tight."

Daryl went out to the kitchen and clanged around a lot getting everything out.

He had no problems making himself at home here. Especially since the Greene's had made Sophia his responsible and hey the kid was hungry finally. It may just have been the smell of the tomatoes cooking or watching the red skin dull in color in the pan, but he began to think that the girl had a good idea going. Daryl found another pan and sliced up another tomato and also helped himself to some bread.

"Takin' too long?" asked Daryl when Sophia walked in.

"They need pepper," she forgot to mention that.

They ate at the island in the kitchen. Sophia had quite the appetite. She ate everything on her plate and the half of his sandwich that Daryl offered up, he normally wasn't one to share food but he decided to make an exception for this little stray, prompting him to make another sandwich.

"You think there's cookies in that jar?" Daryl pointed to an obvious rooster cookie jar.

"Maybe."

Daryl had to find out. He pushed back the rooster

_MMMMOOOO._

Startled Daryl let go of the lid. A giggle behind him shocked him nearly as much. Sophia was smiling and laughing like she hadn't in years.

_Think that's funny, you should see yourself in that shirt._

* * *

Author's Note: Happy Thanksgiving American Peeps.

(I have no idea why it's such a big holiday with my internet writing, I don't even like turkey)

Thanks for so much to all those who reviewed and kept me moving forward with this: Leg64, Emberka-2012, 6747, war90, Ihasbukkit, Surplus Imagination (2x), sammyjase, Guest, GemmaTellerSoa, Rat.

The current story cover is from _The Tree of Life_. A movie I only recommend if you like: pretty pastel sets, nature, Texas, the 1950s, Brad Pitt, poetic but at the same time creepy voice-over narration, gingers, dinosaurs (I shit you not there are dinosaurs) and last but not least, plotless-ness and feeling very, very confused.

There is a concept in that movie that is relevant to this story and that's why I picked it, but I will be changing it later.


	4. Chapter 3

**W**arning: The first is a taste of the M rating.

* * *

_Grace doesn't try to please itself.  
__Accepts being slighted, forgotten, disliked.  
__Accepts insults and injuries._

- The Tree of Life (2011)

* * *

A sudden blaze of light woke me up. The first thing I saw was the mint green sheets I was lying on. My eyes wandered up to the lamp that was turned on and the nightstand that sat on with a thick hard cover book hanging off the edge. I had never seen this room before in my life.

Where am I? I felt sort of hot and shaky. The collar of my shirt was sticking to me in a cool sweat.

Did I have a bad dream? I sure felt like I did. But I don't remember having one and I always, always remember them.

"Hey," Daryl was sitting on the unfamiliar bed.

Everything came back to me like a light switch was flicked on in my head. I was at a farm or something like it and Dad was dead.

Why was Daryl here? What did he want?

I rolled on to my back without thinking. His face was blank and that made me nervous. Sometimes you can tell what a person's thinking by something in their eyes or if they move their mouth, even if its only a twitch. Not with Daryl.

"Sorry to wake ya but you gotta drink this. Don't need ya to wake up dehydrated," He held out a glass of milk.

My mouth went dry instantly. I had no clue where he could've gotten milk, maybe they had cows on this farm. Was it safe to drink milk right out of a cow? I pushed myself up too fast and took the glass from him. It was really cold, like brain freeze cold and it had odd taste. But I didn't care, it had been so long since I had had milk.

"Whoa, take 'er easy. Don't need ya getting sick neither," Daryl pulled the glass away when I started drinking it too fast.

I drank the rest slower and when I was done, I gave the empty glass back and lay back down, making sure to lay on side rather than on my back. Daryl stayed, probably to make sure I went back to sleep was all.

The sooner I went to sleep the sooner he'd go away. But I couldn't keep my eyes shut when he was sitting so close.

Just pretend he's not there.

"I'm sorry you didn't get to see yer mom tonight." It was even harder to pretend he wasn't there when he wouldn't shut his mouth, "She missed you so much, was so worried about you. That night when we stayed out on the highway in the RV, she cried all night."

I wondered where Mom was right now. Daryl said she was nearby. Was she in the RV? Our tent got wrecked that night the walkers came in. Well not really wrecked but there was a huge stain on the floor that would probably never come out. It smelled too. Wherever she was spending the night, I hoped she wasn't crying, that maybe Lori or Andrea are keeping her company.

"We could go out on a horse again," said Daryl. I felt my heart lift up a bit. I didn't remember much of being on Memphis earlier and it was the first time I'd ever been on a horse.

A overly friendly hand smoothed "Yeah figured ya'd like that and I don't really want ta put you on the bike 'cause I don't got a helmet for ya."

I wasn't comfortable on my left side, so I rolled over to my right.

"That light's buggin' ya, huh?"

No. It's mostly you.

Daryl reached under the lampshade and turned the light off. I went blind for a second than I could sort of see the outlines of the furniture in the dark. His hand landed on the back of my shoulder. I pulled my knees up even though he would force them down.

"Ya cold?"

Daryl's hand moved off my shoulder and disappeared under the covers. I squeezed my eyes shut.

Think about something else. I commanded my brain to take me somewhere else.

I thought about the pain. Was Daryl going to be really rough? Like Dad was-

I don't want to be bloody. Please don't make me bleed.

"I just got all cleaned up," I said, without meaning too.

"I know ya did, I helped a bit."

That's right, you did. Why wait till now? Did you think I would trust you more? That I wouldn't fight that way? I don't trust you but I won't fight. I won't make this hard on myself.

"Can turn this up a little. It feels pretty hot already," He clicked the electric blanket up with the control at the end of the bed.

His hand went back to stroking my shoulder and back. I kept waiting for his hand to go down to my hip…to move to…to move somewhere else.

Just be gentle. I'll hold still and be quiet.

"Don't pick at that," he grabbed my wrist with his other hand and pulled it away from the scab on my shoulder.

I didn't know I was scratching it. Sometimes I don't feel it until the skin is red.

Get it over with already.

"I won't tell nobody," I whispered.

If that's what you're worried about. You don't need to be. I know that no one can know.

"Won't tell what?"

I couldn't say it.

"That I like getting my hair shampooed," he said, "I know ya won't, sweetheart."

Over and over and over again, Daryl's hand went up and down my back. The bed got warmer and warmer underneath me. My eyes kept shutting and it took me longer and longer to open them again. I was a second away from being a sleep when I felt Daryl get off the bed.

"I'm gonna go crash on the couch. If ya need anything just holler."

Then he vanished like he had never been there at all.

* * *

Author's Note

Tiny chapter but I thought this should stand on its own rather than have a huge chunk of the next chapter be in_ italics_.

I hope you know I was not implying anything about Daryl, it's just what Sophia was thinking. If it was Rick or Glenn, her thoughts would be the same.

You guys are the reason that my clothes don't make it back into my dresser. I always write on laundry day and by the time its done, I'm too involved to put them away: 6474, deelove1, bigpinkstork, Narnian at Heart, Surplus Imagination, war90, Emberka-2012, bspooky3, Ihasabukkit, sammyjase, elijeha2000, Rising Phoenix416, GemmaTellerSoa.


	5. Chapter 4

_Oh for crying out loud  
__Every face in the crowd  
__Was looking at us._

_Sweet amazing grace  
__Every time, every space  
__Everything in it's place  
__Like I was King for a day_

- Crush. King For A Day.

* * *

The pattering of the raindrops on the roof of the Grimes' tent began to decrease into small dribbles as the storm began to die out.

"You can't blame yourself," Lori said for the fifth time as the last conversation faded.

"She's right," said Rick, "Daryl had it in his head this morning that he was going out, the most you could do was stall him for a bit."

_If you had gone out like you said you were going too, Daryl wouldn't of. _She couldn't help but blame him a little. However she blamed herself more. If only she had placed stronger emphasis on the fact that he was still hurting since he wasn't listening to what his body was saying. If only she had the strength to tell him that there wasn't much hope in finding Sophia.

Carol picked at a bit of dirt under her fingernail. She should go to the RV. Dale had been kind enough to open his door to her for the last few nights. She looked around their tent to see if anything needed sewing. Lori said it wasn't her strong suit and Carol doubted she would be able to sleep tonight and her latest project, one of Glenn's baseball T's with a torn sleeve wouldn't take long. Her eyes rested on a white plastic bottle of vitamins tucked against the wall on the table.

"I'm pregnant," Lori explained quietly. Aside from Glenn, Dale, Maggie, Rick, and Shane, no one knew about her condition. She dreaded just having them find out

"Congratulations," Carol smiled, looking from Lori at her side to Rick sitting on the cot. "Both of you."

Lori was very visibly taken back at her sincere reaction to the news. Carol knew why. With what happened to Carl and Sophia, why would someone would want to bring another child in to this world. However when it came down to it, no matter what state the world was it was still the miracle of life.

"This is a good thing," she reassured her.

"You think?" Lori said.

"Yes. This is a great thing," Carol pulled her into a hug.

It occurred to Lori that she wasn't on her own. She had someone who had been through a pregnancy, who would understand what she was going through, someone she could talk to.

"_We can still draw strength from each other," _Dale had said to her.

He may have been right.

* * *

As soon as it began to get a little light inside the RV via early morning sun, Carol got out of the little bed that she had lain awake in all night. Dale was still asleep in the bed across from hers. She observed Andrea's sleeping form in her makeshift bed that folded down from the dinette when she tiptoed over to the door.

At first Carol smiled when she remembered doing her best to put a pillow under Daryl's head, who had graciously volunteered to sleep on the floor that night on the highway, even though Andrea told him that she wasn't tired and he could have the bed. Although she did her best not to wake him, Daryl did wake up and got a little snippy with her for it but then rolled over and may have mumbled gracias.

That smile fell fast and became a hard pit in her stomach.

Daryl, who had almost died looking for her daughter when there was little chance of finding her, who may be out there now when there was even littler chance of finding her and he was still injured.

Maybe he'd made it back. It would be just like him to sleep outside by the campfire burned down to nothing but embers. Unfortunately when she opened the door, he wasn't curled up in a lawn chair with the crossbow on his lap, nor was there any new tent set up.

While she waited for the standard, blue portable water tank to fill the kettle up, Carol, having given up thinking about Sophia, tried to imagine what her father would say to her to comfort her.

_Revelations 21:4, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes; there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying. There shall be no more pain, for the former things have passed away._

Lori had shared with Carol her thoughts of the night Carl got shot when they weren't sure if he was going to make it, and she said to her if the worse had happened Sophia wouldn't have to run, or be afraid anymore. She was free.

_John 14:1-4. Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God; trust also in me. In my Father's house are many rooms; if it were not so, I would have told you. I am going there to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am. You know the way to the place where I am going._

Her father would probably tell her that Sophia was with God in Heaven and that she would see her again.

Maybe her father wouldn't say anything. Would he not question God's plan too? Could even a preacher not have his faith shaken over the death of his only granddaughter?

_Ecclesiates 3:1-8. To everything there is a season, a time for every purpose under the sun. A time to be born and a time to die…_

That was Sophia's favorite passage, had been since she was five.

* * *

A heart-stopping scream sliced through the conversation. It was a wonder that they didn't spill their iced tea as both mother and grandmother put down their refreshments and ran around the side of the little yellow bi-level to the front yard where Sophia had wandered off to get something, only after Carol made sure she promised to come right back to the backyard to play.

Her first thought had been that her five year old had walked out into the road and got hit by a car. Much to Carol's relief, Sophia was unharmed. She was sitting in the grass. Her hair cast over her face, reminding Carol that she needed to get her in for a hair cut.

"What's wrong? Why are you crying?" Carol bent over to be able to hear what her upset child was going to say.

"Ginger hurt a bird," A teary Sophia held out a bloody, lifeless sparrow she was cradling in both hands. The perpetrator, Ginger the orange tabby cat was crouched a few yards away.

Sophia brought the bird back down to her lap and stroked one of its outstretched wings with one finger. She was waiting for it to come to life but the bird wasn't hurt. It was dead. Carol scooped the bird out of Sophia's hands, it was unnervingly damp and sticky. "I'm sorry, Roo. There's nothing we can do for it."

Eyes still watering, Sophia looked over at the sparrow, head lolled back at an unnatural angles, tiny, gray claws clenched into balls. Ginger began to creep in on her belly to reclaim her kill.

"Bad cat!" she screeched, grabbing a small rock and chucked it at Ginger.

"Sophia. No. I don't ever want to see you throw another rock at living creature again." Carol scolded her. "Ginger can't help it, she's a cat. They go after birds sometimes, it's just what they do."

She took Sophia inside the house she had grown up in. They walked down the wood floored hallway that Sophia would slide down in her socks now as she had once and washed her hands in the bathroom, goodness knows what could've been on that bird.

They went back out to the backyard and then in for dinner. Sophia played unnaturally quiet the whole time.

After dinner Sophia looked out the front window to the scene of the crime while Carol visited a little longer with her parents. Ed hadn't been happy they were coming out here today, so she didn't think they would be out next Sunday. Of course she wasn't going to tell them that right now. After three years, she still hadn't heard the end of her moving away.

"Why did the bird die?" She asked.

Carol and her mother, May, had explained to her numerous times that the bird's death was a part of nature order but it apparently did little to console her. In Sophia's world, nature was supposed to be like a Disney movie.

Her patriarchal father, Robert, waved Sophia over to his barker lounger and sat her in his lap like he use to do with Carol and her sisters when they were small.

"It was it's time, Roo," he said. "There is a planned time for everything to happen. It's why you can only plant veggies in the spring and not in the fall or winter. You'll see plenty of things come and go in your life, and there will be a season for you to do so many great things. But promise no matter how big you grow, you'll always come visit your Mamaw and Papaw."

"Always." Sophia looked up to her Papaw like he had all the answers.

_Why did I take her away from here? _Carol questioned. Her dream had always been for Sophia to grow up in her hometown; to catch minnows in the stream with Linda McTraver's kids, to run down for slurpies at the 7/11 on Main Street on a hot summer day, to live in Dawsonville, the community that knew her name.

They sat in her father's church a few weeks later. Sophia was starting to squirm in the pew and was much more interested in how the colored light pattern from the stained glass windows covered her hands than what her Papaw was saying.

"…my grand daughter, Sophia was quite upset about what happened to this little bird."

Hearing her name, Sophia froze in place, arms outstretched with lavender and green diamonds up her arms. As he began to recite the Bible verse that his speech to her was based on, Carol watched Sophia become so concentrated in every word.

A week later, she could recite the verse almost word for word.

* * *

Rick was sitting up on the RV. His mind was so occupied with everything going on that he didn't notice Maggie riding up until she was right on their doorstep so to speak. He climbed down off the roof to greet her.

"Hey, we got two of yours back at our place," she said from on top of her horse scratching it's leg with its teeth.

"Two?" The number confused him at first then it slowly dawned on Rick what that meant, "Daryl found Sophia?"

Maggie nodded. "Yeah, she's drop dead tired, couldn't keep her awake for more than five minutes. Daryl was going to go out looking for your camp and then bring her back to cut down on the time he'd be holding her up in the saddle but he's tired too, he was up with her most the night. So I thought I better."

Maggie hopped down off her horse and tried to sneak a glance at the new camp. The back of the RV blocked out most of it. She was on the look out for two people, Glenn, and Shane. The former she wanted to talk to, the latter she wanted to avoid.

"You go in and get them, that's it. Do not talk to my dad," said Maggie, "I'll try vouching for you guys once he's calmed down."

Rick looked at her in disbelief, the stress he'd been holding in the corner of his eyes and around his mouth eased away. They had an inside man. There was hope yet.

"But only if you don't intrude," Maggie stated firmly. "Things are hard enough right now."

Maggie wanted them back. Glenn was a part of that but also her close call with the walker in pharmacy had snapped her awake to how dangerous this new world was. They had been lucky to survive just them for as long as they did. Plus living off their land entailed a lot of work that was very hard on all of them.

Rick nodded, "don't say anything until we get back."

Maggie looked confused.

"We can't take this away from Daryl," he explained.

Rick shook the smile off while he walked around the RV. Finally a win. They had been long over due for one.

Carol was crouched by the fire pit, a dish towel in her hand . The kettle hung over the flames beginning to whistle slightly as it reached its boiling point.

"Hey, Daryl made it back to the Greene's last night," he told her, it was hard not to say anything about Sophia. "He's in rough shape, so could you come with me and drive him back, while I drive his motorcycle back."

"Of course." She took the kettle off of the fire and set it to the side. Someone else would have to make the coffee. They had to get moving before Daryl took off again.

They didn't talk the whole ride there. Each going through their own personal struggle, they didn't want to share. It wasn't a comfortable silence but thankfully it wasn't a long drive to the Greene's.

Through the screen door they could see Daryl moving about the kitchen, looks like they got there just in time. He gave them a brief nod when they walked in and then went back to his breakfast sizzling on the stove, a generous helping of four eggs. Carol wasn't sure if she wanted to hit him or hug him. Either one would probably get the same flinch from him.

"Does Sophia like pepper on her eggs?" he asked, dividing the eggs on to separate plates. Carol looked at him like she just ran into a glass door. Hard. Very Hard.

"I know she likes it on tomatoes…"

Behind her, Rick's crack of a grin told Daryl for whatever reason he had not told her that Sophia was here as well. The absolutely stunned expression on Carol's face told him that saying Sophia was here wouldn't be enough. She'd have to see it.

"C'mon," Daryl gently took Carol's wrist and led the shell shocked mother down the hallway and into the bedroom where Sophia was curled up in the bed in the ball she had been all night even though there was no way she could've been cold with the electric blanket up as high as it was.

_It can't be. _Carol thought.

"She's fine – well exhausted – but just fine like I said." It would be the first in a long line of I-told-you-so's for Daryl.

Completely overwhelmed, Carol walked over to the bed. She felt like her legs might give out on her but she made it over to sit beside the daughter she thought she would never see again. She tucked her hair behind her ears. Her hair was soft and silky. Being able to feel her proved it to be real, Sophia was really lying here.

The touch woke Sophia up. She expected it to be Daryl, who had been oddly fussing over her.

"Mom?" Sophia questioned her eyes when she saw her mom sitting beside her.

The lost girl went to sit up about the same time her mother leaned forward and they met in a hug in the middle.

It wasn't long before they were both crying. Crying and holding each other.

Daryl stayed in the room, leaning against the wall with his arms crossed. The thought of his breakfast going cold crossed his mind but he couldn't leave. Normally people crying, especially girls, made him uncomfortable and all but run from the room. This was different.

"I love you. I love you so much…" Carol found her voice and said the only thought that was in her head at that moment.

"I love you too, Mom." Sophia pressed herself as close as she could to her mom.

Finding Sophia hadn't felt like anything special until now he could see the aftermath of it. They were reunited. Carol had her daughter back, Sophia could be held by her mother and it was all because of him.

A seed of happiness embedded itself over his heart, somewhere high up on the aorta.

* * *

_Meep, meep, meep, meep. _A small travelers alarm clock began chirping. It was set to wake Glenn up for his early morning watch shift. It consequentially woke up his tent mates, T-Dog and Shane.

"Sorry guys, " Glenn apologized as he looked for the off button.

_Meep, meep, meep. _The alarm continued to sing the song of it's people as a flustered Glenn couldn't find the button. T-Dog grabbed it from him, silencing it instantly.

"You've lost all alarm privileges," said T-Dog.

"Shoulda taken that way after the last time," said Shane, shamelessly shirtless as he stretched the kinks out of his body.

Glenn feigned a sad look complete with his bottom lip sticking out in a pout and crawled out of the tent. He stuck his head back in. "Hey could someone throw me my hat?"

T-Dog looked over at Glenn's corner of the tent, his baseball cap sitting perfect on top of his stuff, and did nothing more.

"Please," begged Glenn. His shoes were too dirty to walk into the tent with and he just tied them up.

Shane gave it a small toss so it landed close to the entrance. Glenn leaned in as far as possible but the hat remained out of reach. This would be so much easy if he was in _Portal_.

"C'mon son, ya gotta want it," Shane teased as Glenn's fingers brushed at the rim.

"I don't think he does," T-Dog chimed in when he continued to fail at reaching it.

"You bums needed to get up anyway." Glenn found a way to shift a little closer so that his toes were barely inside the tent and grabbed his hat.

He walked over to the RV to grab whatever food they had for breakfast where Andrea and Dale and Maggie…Glenn completely forgot what he was doing.

"Good morning," she greeted.

"Maggie. Um hi," said Glenn. Despite how happy he was to see her, she could tell he was a wondering why she was here at all.

"Daryl came back to our place last night right before the storm to return our horse, was barely able to hold himself up in the saddle, had ripped out all his stitches. We didn't think it'd be wise for him to ride back on his motorcycle so I came to get someone to bring him back." Maggie restated the story she had told Andrea and Dale.

"Oh. Do you want some coffee or are you staying that long?" asked Glenn hopefully, "oh crap, I'm on watch right now."

"I'll make it and bring it up to you then." Maggie accepted his offer to have a chat.

Carl was the last one out of bed. He commonly was now. It wasn't only that he was still recovering from getting shot, his dad said he was growing. He wasn't going to get up right away then he recognized Maggie's voice outside as she talked to his mom. That got him up.

"Hi, can we borrow those maps? Me and my dad are going to look for Sophia," asked Carl. He did notice his dad wasn't around right now, but was confident he'd come back soon. Rick promised Carl that they could look for Sophia, especially if Daryl wouldn't be able to.

_This is news to me._ Lori looked over at her adventurous son.

"Shoot, I didn't think to bring those, I'll run back and get them in a bit," Maggie could hardly keep a straight face and very quickly joined Glenn up on top of the RV.

Everyone fell in to doing odd chores around camp.

"Hey Glenn, can I grab your sleeping bag?" Lori called up to him, "me and Carol are going to wash all the bedding today."

"Absolutely. Thanks. It's starting smell." Glenn added without thinking of his companion, Maggie snorted in mid-drink, "Um Carol went with Rick to our place to get Daryl. "

Right on queue, the roar of the motorcycle coming up the road made them all look out towards the approaching vehicles. They were a little surprised to see it was Daryl who circled in on the motorcycle but they didn't get overly suspicious. Carol getting out of the backseat rather than the front caught some attention. Then Sophia managed to climb out of the car on unsteady bare feet.

The group had a collective response, a wide eye opening shock to happy surprise and to a big smile. Daryl looked over at the only who skipped the surprised phase, Maggie.

_Why was no one told?_

Sophia didn't get to far before she toppled over. Sleep deprivation is the same as being drunk, sitting in the grass in a daze in a shirt that obviously wasn't hers that was exactly how she looked.

She made no move to stand up. Carol was too shaky to try and lift her. Daryl expected Rick to move in but he was grinning uncontrollably with the rest of them.

"Hey, I know you ain't big on being carried but hows about you give those worn out feet a break and let me pick ya up?" Daryl asked her.

"Okay," Sophia agreed, much to Carol's surprise.

Daryl grabbed her up under the arms and scooped her up again. Since she was still only clad in his shirt so he had to be really mindful on how he held her. Sophia reached over his shoulder to Carol. Her mother took her hand and kissed her knuckles.

_Wings. There were angel wings on Daryl's back. They weren't soft or delicate looking like every other pair I'd seen in pictures or on statues. Their lines were rough, making jagged feathers but they were still angel wings and were beautiful all the same. _

Sophia's head drooped as she fell back asleep, her cheek resting the sun warmed leather vest. She looked so peaceful. Carol almost started crying again.

At that moment, a herd of walkers could've overrun the camp. Everyone was frozen in place, watching the three of them.

Daryl took Sophia into the RV, Carol right on his heels, and tucked her in to bed that Carol had lain awake in thinking about her. He can't explain why he felt compelled to do so but Daryl smoothed the back of her head.

Sophia had slept last night but it couldn't of been restful with the way she was almost constantly whining and crying out. Daryl wanted to wake her up, seemed way kinder than letting her stay in whatever she was dreaming about but he'd been strongly told waking her up was the last thing to do when they spent the night in the old folks home. He wondered if Carol remembered that night. Her delivery of _don't you dare_ as Daryl was about to wake Sophia up, sent him back to his spot with his tail between his legs.

"Thank you," Carol hugged him as he turned to leave. A little hard for his new stitches.

"Save it for yer girl," Daryl mumbled.

Carol sat down on the bed. Daryl lingered in the door a bit, like he had when he gave her the Cherokee rose, and took in the scene of the two of them like they were on a TV show or a movie, removed from this bleak new world.

"Is she ok?" asked Carl, once he stepped outside. "She's ok, right?"

Everyone else was asking him the same wordlessly, Daryl felt like they may as well be holding a thousand microphones out to him.

"Yeah, she's fine. Like I said."

Carl hugged him. It threw Daryl off guard and Andrea moved in for a casual one-armed hug around his neck once the boy let go.

"Make her a sandwich?" asked Andrea when she broke off.

"No, she wanted fried tomatoes," said Daryl. "I made myself one and she ate half of that too though."

Dale clapped Daryl on the back. "This is astounding. That's all I can say. Good work, son."

There was more hugs and thumps on the back than he could keep track of after that, it got to be so overwhelming for him to but in a good way.

"How'd ya find her?" someone asked.

He recounted how Sophia walked out in front of him and more. Maggie couldn't help but contribute a little bit when she felt something needed to be said about the last night.

"…He got so damn snappy with me but turned on his heel and was so nice to Sophia." Maggie retold the hurricane that hit her bathroom good-naturedly.

Daryl's ears burnt at that. No one had stopped grinning at him which didn't help matters.

That seed of happiness on his heart sprouted vines that twined around every bone in his body and blossomed. Daryl never felt so good in his whole life as he did right then.

* * *

Carol sat beside the light of her life. She thought about doing some knitting buy was physically unable to stop reaching out and caressing Sophia's face or stroking her hair.

In all honesty, Sophia had been an accident. Her and Ed weren't planning on starting a family, not when they were barely making ends meet. But her initial reaction to the positive result on the pee stick was over joy. She was going to be a mother.

The RV jounced as someone came in the door. It was Daryl.

"She was badly dehydrated last night, had to give her a IV. Wasn't too happy with me. So make sure she drinks somethin' in a little while." Daryl gave Carol a full water bottle.

"I'll never be able to fully thank you," said Carol.

"Don't need to. I just looked in the right place. Actually she walked out right in front of me. Rick or Shane could've-"

"No, they weren't looking anymore," stated Carol firmly. Daryl chewed on his bottom lip. "If it weren't for you, she would've died out there."

Daryl nodded and very quickly ducked out of the RV.

_Why does he have such a hard time accepting how good he is? _

Apparently she didn't scare Daryl off to bad as he came back in ten minutes later with a small Tupperware container of a cream colored powder and Sophia's old clothes.

"Patricia gave me some powdered milk to give to her last night to get some calories in her. There's about two cups in there, I think and I'm not sure if you can save these."

"I was wondering about this," Carol thumbed the collar of his shirt.

"Didn't have anything else."

"She was pretty dirty and wanted to clean up. She really thought she would see you last night. Kept askin' where ya were. I don't know what happened to her shoulder. But obviously ain't a bite, fever would've hit her long before now."

"Its a sort of a old wound. She scratches herself when she's upset or nervous," Carol explained.

From the looks of sizable hole, Sophia had been going out of her mind with worry in the woods.

"Anyone gets weird about it, let me know. I'll set 'em straight," said Daryl.

Carol got some gauze and medical tape from the bathroom. Daryl had a point about someone getting suspicious about it and bandaging it would keep Sophia from further irritating it. Looking for an escape from everyone else, Daryl stayed in the RV. Carol was too nice to say anything if he was bugging her but he got the sense that he wasn't and he liked that.

* * *

"Man, I can't believe you found her," said Shane.

They happened on each other while walking back, each doing a quick patrol after dinner before it got dark. Daryl was excused from it but he wanted to.

"Yeah I know you can't," growled Daryl.

Shane cocked his head a little to the right. There had been nothing provoking in his tone but the redneck acted as if there was.

"You had her own mother convinced to give up on her when she was alive this whole time."

In Daryl's eyes, if anyone was to be blamed for wanting to give up on Sophia it was Shane. If it had been Carl, anyone who dare question whether they keep looking even if a month passed would've been shot down. Daryl knew the score, Sophia was treated differently because she wasn't born into the right family. It disturbed him.

"It was highly unlikely that she was alive. C'mon man, you almost died out there." Shane couldn't back down.

"But I didn't and neither did she," neither could Daryl. "When you see Sophia hoppin' around here, know that you were wrong."

Sophia was hopping around camp when they walked in. Not in literally, if she looked intoxicated before, she now looked like the day afterward. As weary as she looked, she was stacking firewood with such concentration. There was something strange about it.

T-Dog walked up behind her. Startled Sophia dropped a log on her hand.

"Are you alright?" he asked.

"Yes. It's fine," she shied away from him.

Shane called T-Dog over to where he had joined Andrea stringing cans, and Sophia's attention followed him. She had the same troubled expression that she had when he sat with her. She looked around camp and Daryl's gaze followed hers. Something where Carol was doing dishes with Lori rubbed her the wrong way.

Their eyes locked for moment, then Sophia went back to stacking the logs with new energy. Daryl continued watching. She became almost frantic when a one log wouldn't fit anywhere in to the newly organized pile. With few exceptions for logs with half the width of the others, the columns were always four high. He looked back to Carol and Lori. The drying rack had no system, plates were in with cups, and running wild with the spoons.

_Does she have OCD? _Daryl wondered.

She started scratching at the bandage on her shoulder.

_It has too. I have to find a place for it._

Slowly and from the front, Daryl approached her and held out his hand.

"Here."

* * *

Author's Note:

Thanks to all who reviewed. I hope you all had happy holidays and 2013 has been very kind so far; _GemmaTellerSoa, letmefallasleep, 6747, Emberka-2012, war90, Lilacsonafence, Ihasabukkit, Chemical Ghost, JackAndHoney, Lord-Cas, sonshinedaisy, _

On the Talking Dead, they mentioned a deleted scene in "Say The Word." with Daryl and Maggie talking about the death of Lori, and supposedly Carol where Daryl says Carol had so much hope for the baby. That's where the first part came from.

There is a deleted scene in Season 2 where they go back to the nursing home at the very start. I'm using it as canon fact.

My question to you is: Think they are going to get back to the Farm?

Next time on Dark Horse:  
All good things must come to an end. A close call leaves one of the group broken.


	6. Chapter 5

_I'm not crazy. __I'm just a little unwell.  
__I know right now you can't tell  
__But stay awhile and maybe then you'll see  
__A different side of me._

_- _Matchbox 20. Unwell

* * *

The next three days passed by uneventfully but uneasy all the same. Their new camp was more exposed than the Greene's farm so they were on edge. It didn't help that Shane was using their fear to stage a mutiny to get the group to leave for Fort Benning. Rick still wanted to stay in the area, holding out hope that having Maggie as an ambassador would be enough to get Herschel to let them back. It was making for a stressful group dynamic.

It wasn't so much the reason Sophia was ill at ease as she sat across from Carl and Lori with a world atlas in front of her.

The breeze played with the thirteen tin cans hanging on the line at the edge of camp. Besides being the worst possible number, they weren't evenly spaced out. Sophia glued her eyes to the map she was trying to fill in. She could still see the string in her mind. The scraggly line that represented a river on the west coast stayed unlabeled as she came up with a strategy to fix the cans.

It became impossible to sit still. To not get up from her seat and take the first one off the string and move it back about five inches, leave the second one where it was, move the third one to the right three inches, the fourth right another two inches.

_Go on and do it. Daryl already thinks you're nuts, why not let everyone else know too? _

A cold voice started whispering in her ear. _You know what they say? You can't be ashamed of who you are. _

She put her pencil to the map. It made a small mark that didn't really effect the quality of the map but all the same Sophia flipped the pencil around in her hand and rubbed the eraser over the mark.

_So be who you are_. That voice taunted her as it always did.

The eraser blew the mark into an ugly smudged streak. Sophia rubbed it harder but that made it worse, covering half of the state of Arizona in an grey smog.

_A dirty freak._

_Please just shut up. _Sophia snapped back.

_Yeah beg. Like he always said you would. That's a good wh-_

_Shut up!_

"Sophia. Sophia." Lori tried to get her attention as the pencil flexed in her fist. "Take a break, ok?"

Lori looked at her with that motherly concern.

_Nice going. _She gave herself a sarcastic pat on the back.

She nodded and swung her legs out from underneath the picnic table. She kept her eyes down as she walked through camp. Sophia didn't have any place in mind to go. She just walked.

"Is everything ok?" asked Carl, catching up to her.

_Could you say it any louder? _

Dale's eyes flitted to over to them, curiously awaiting her reply.

"Yes, everything's fine." Sophia spoke the words slowly so her voice wouldn't betray her and crack with emotion. She was well practiced at it. Same with not letting her hands shake even when her heart was going million miles an hour.

"Wanna play checkers?" Carl asked.

_No I do not._

"Alright." She had to pretend she was okay or else he'd get suspicious and start asking questions and she didn't have the energy right now to side step around them.

They were in the middle of their second game, Sophia had lost the first game and was losing ground and pieces almost every second turn because she couldn't pay attention to Carl's moves when there was so much going on in camp around her. Lori and Shane were talking, Glenn was wrapping up a hose around his arm, Rick was walking up to them.

"Glenn and I are going to go refill the water. You two want to come along, see the creek?" he asked.

"Yes," said Carl enthusiastically.

_Thank God. _Sophia thought. "I think I'll stay here."

Carl looked torn between them.

"Go on. I got to do some reading," Sophia gave him a nudge.

She wasn't lying about reading. Sophia found her copy of _The Yearling_, that she was assigned for a book report. It was a big book, which she didn't like but it had a cute little fawn on the cover, she liked that at least.

Sophia sat down in a lawn chair by Carol stitching up several tears in someone's sleeping bag. She watched her mom's hand very careful guidance of the needle and thread in and out of the torn green fabric. Carol could fix anything.

_She couldn't fix the tears in you. _That voice came back. _And she wouldn't want to if she knew._

Sophia kicked off her shoes and bunched her socks up into the bottom of them. She still had the tensor on her ankle, that had gotten loose and slide down a bit.

_She wouldn't want anything to do with you. _

Sophia continued to ignore it. She tucked her legs up on the lawn chair and cracked open the paper backs cover.

"_A column of smoke rose thin and straight from the cabin chimney. The smoke was blue…" _she read over the first lines.

No it wasn't.

_The cigarette smoke was ghostly silver, I watched it curl and twist and break apart into very thin ribbons until it disappeared. I like to try and imagine things in it like eagles or other animals. _

_Dad brought the cigarette up to his lips, the tip blazed orange in the dimness of the living room. His drag was cut off as he celebrated the Falcons scoring a touch down. He leaned back against the couch, his arm stretched out against the back of it behind me. _

_I watched the replay of the touchdown in slow motion, I really didn't get this stupid game, then out the window at the darkening sky, could feel the cool night breeze coming in through its open screen. I wondered what Megan and Emma were doing. I was supposed to hang out with them but Dad told her me had to stay home. They were probably out at the park, eating pizza from Papa's Pizza because they sold it by the slice. _

_The lounge chair was empty. Mom was working at the diner tonight. I should've gone with her and helped out. I'm going to need new pointe shoes soon. _

_I remembered there was a grape soda in the fridge, right next to the margarine. I was just about to get up when Dad's hand came down from the back of the couch and grabbed the back of my neck painfully tight…_

Andrea walked in front of her chair pulling Sophia out of her old living room and back in camp. Her fingers trembling at corner of the page, threatening to rip it, tear it…

"_The Yearling,_ I read that in school a looong time ago," said Andrea, seeing the cover. "It's a classic."

She merely nodded, knowing she wouldn't be able to keep her voice even this time. Her calm, even if just pretend, was cracked now.

Broken.

Trying desperately to catch her breath, Sophia looked around camp at her fellow survivors, that she had gotten to know over the last couple of weeks. They were all good people.

She got up and walked around camp, the outskirts so no one would notice her.

The grass was cool on her bare feet. She liked walking around in bare foot. Another thing she liked was blueberries. Sophia found a small bush and plucked two blueberries off a vine. Keeping them in her hand, she crouched down to look for any other of nature's treat hidden by the leaves. A cluster of blueberries hung together but they were all too small and green to be picked.

There were probably more bushes around. Sophia went back up the small slope to camp and grabbed a empty ice cream bucket and went back down to the tree line.

Every summer her and her mom would go out to this farm outside of Dawsonville where you could pick enough blueberries and blackberries to fill a whole ice cream bucket. Carol would always bake a pie or two depending on how many berries Sophia ate. That night at the Greene's was far from the first time she had thrown up purely berries. Sophia popped the newest blueberry in her mouth rather than put it in the bucket. It wouldn't be the last either.

Working her way down the tree line, she almost stepped on a gathering of toadstools. They were small and whitish brown, so they were technically only mushrooms, but she liked toadstools better, especially when they were seated in a horseshoe shape like there had been a meeting of fairies. Sophia didn't know anything about mushrooms so she didn't pick any, however she did poke the rubbery tops.

She could pick just one. Carl would like them.

_The fairies returned when the moon was highest in the night sky to discuss what was to be done about all the rabbits. Iris sat beside Rosaline, and Daisy beside her and so on and so forth. However there was an empty spot in the half circle. _

"_Where's my seat?" asked Tiger Lily. _

_Without a seat, Tiger Lily had no vote. And so they didn't get majority vote and nothing was done about the rabbits and they ate the whole forest, leaving millions homeless._

Then again, maybe she better not.

Her Papaw had a vegetable garden. He use to pay her a dollar when she was young for helping him weed it, even though she just picked the stem and left the roots in the ground. She would spend that dollar at the dollar store. She normally bought little plastic animals. Whenever her mom or Mamaw bought strawberries at the store, they saved the green baskets for her because they made perfect pens for the animals, except for the giraffes or the giant llama.

"_Is there a flood coming?" _Papaw would say when she sat up all the little cages in her grandparent's living room.

Once she bought a barrel of monkeys. Monkeys were one of her favorite animals. Sometimes she bought other things but right now Sophia couldn't remember what they were.

The oval leaves of another blueberry bush caught her eye. Sophia found some more berries. It was a good bush, there were lots of ripe berries. Two thirds went into the bucket.

The only thing she wasn't allowed to buy at the dollar store were those gooey, sticky things that stuck on the wall or on the roof when you threw them because they left slime marks behind. Little did Carol know that she got one in goodie bag at Wendy's birthday party and Sophia got it stuck on the roof of their basement. It was probably still up on the ceiling.

_Run! _An alarm sounded in her head like a siren as a walker came out of the woodwork towards her.

Could she outrun it? The camp was an entire football field away and her ankle was still sore.

_Scream! _

She couldn't. It was stuck in her throat.

_What are you waiting for, idiot!? _

Sophia opened her mouth but all she managed was a highish yip. It only succeeded in alerting the walker to her, it did nothing to let anyone back at camp know about it.

"Sophia Lynn, yer a bit far from camp, don't cha think?"

It wasn't a walker. It was Daryl walking in the forest, coming back from his hunt, a two dead grouse swinging by the feet in one hand, the other on the crossbows strap slung across his chest. He looked at her, then to the small tent city over her shoulder, then back to her.

_Since when did you care so much is what I think. _Sophia thought. _And how do you know my middle name?_

For an instant, he saw defiance in her eyes. It was surprising since it goes without saying that she wasn't in any way, shape or form in a standpoint to intimidate him.

"Let's go. Before I gotta git more stitches 'cause of ya," Daryl pointed her back to camp with a hand on her shoulder.

It wasn't her injured shoulder. Sophia stumbled over her own heel, and twisted her head around to keep an eye on him. It put her back in her place like a slap to the back of the head which was what Sophia thought was coming and Daryl didn't mean for at all.

"Aw shit, sorry." Out of some odd habit, Daryl clapped her on the back, exactly what he was apologizing for. Sophia shrugged her shoulders back in defense. "Crap, I'm sorry, sorry. I'll stop."

That kicked off an awkward walk.

"How's your ankle?" asked Daryl.

"It's getting better. How's your side?"

"It's good. Still have the lucky six an' they haven't gotten infected yet so that's a plus."

_All you gotta do is keep them clean _Sophia thought.

His hand was dirty with flecks of blood from the grouse. His fingernails were short and uneven, ragged to the touch no doubt. They gave her more chills than the dead eyes of the grouse.

Sophia ate another blueberry from out of the bucket. she offered the bucket to Daryl.

"Thanks," said Daryl, taking a few berries.

Even though he had a hard time keeping his hands, dirty hands might she add, to himself, she was grateful that Daryl was walking back with her and he was walking slowly so she had an easy time keeping up with him because he knew her ankle was still hurting.

"There you are," greeted Carl as they entered camp.

_There you are? Are you fucking kiddin' me? _Daryl looked over at Sophia like he might lay into her.

He didn't say anything though, only tossed his head and scoffed as he walked in the same strut he had when he was told that they weren't going to shoot Amy in the head after she died.

"I caught some tadpoles, come see." Carl grabbed her wrist to show her. Sophia jerked back a little.

_You can't be normal for two seconds. _That same voice came back.

She allowed Carl to lead her but that didn't mean she was at all ok with it.

"Please tell me those taste like chicken," commented Glenn as Daryl walked towards the fire pit.

"Yeah," answered Daryl, not really hearing the question. He turned to Andrea, Carol, and Lori who ceased their conversation once they noticed him standing there. "Not the only thing I found out there. Found yer little wayward girl twenty yards from here."

Carol was taken back at the hostility. Inwardly she cringed at what the others were thinking; that she was a horrible mother.

"Thanks, I'll - um - I'll have a talk with her," said Carol.

"Talk to her. Tie her up in the RV…"

His voice carried over to where Sophia was watching a handful of tadpoles swim around in the circular confines of a yellow bucket.

" …I don't care what ya do, just keep a damn eye on her," Daryl barked before storming off, away from the scowls of Andrea and Lori.

Everything in the outside world became muffled so Sophia didn't hear the last part. It was the first bit that echoed over and over in her head.

_He's right. You should be tied up. You shouldn't be allowed to walk around with everyone else. These are good people. _

The mute button got flicked off, not only did the world become filled with noise once more, but it was all magnified even the tiny, sporadic splashes of the tadpoles rang out like bells. She was drowned in noise outside and in.

_He knows._ _Why else would he say that? _

_That's crazy, there's no way he could. _

Before she knew it, Sophia was standing by the alarm tin can system. She would have to break the string to readjust the cans.

"What are you doing?" asked Carl, who had followed her. She heard him but it was like he was speaking another language.

_No he doesn't know about it but he does know there is something wrong with me. He can see it. _

She pulled as hard as she could, trying to snap it.

_He'll tell the others. _

"Give me your knife," Sophia said softly to Carl.

Carl took his knife out of his pocket. He didn't offer it, she just took it.

"Sophia, what are you doing?" he asked again.

His best friend had a strange look on her face that bothered him for some reason.

Like an animal pinned into a corner, her inner thoughts became aggressive and lashed out.

_He's got to go._

The blade was more than enough for the string. It ripped through it and then through the upper part of Sophia's hand.

_Blood. Not a lot. There was a small trickle of blood running down to my knee. It stained my silky, pink PJ shorts, the ones with the pandas on them…_

A panicked look on Carl's face caught Dale's attention. He walked over to the two resident kids. The can string was broken at one end. Sophia was staring blankly at her bleeding hand.

"She accidently cut herself with my knife, cutting the string," Carl explained.

Dale moved in to take a look. Sophia snapped out of her little moment to react in the way she should; upset.

"Hey, it's ok," he coaxed her.

Rick overheard them and went to offer some assistance.

_For God's sakes, back off. _Daryl thought as he too became aware of what was going on. He had half a mind to go over there himself but that would put way too many people in the vicinity.

"Sophia, can I see it? I won't touch it. Promise." asked Rick gently.

Sophia obliged, holding her palm out towards Rick. The wound stretched from her pinkie to her finger finger and up across her middle finger.

"It ain't deep," Rick said, "Carl, go get some band aids."

Happy to help, Carl wasted no time running to the RV. Sophia watched him go, right past Shane and T-Dog who were curiously watching them. Daryl was also watching her, less curious.

"…but he's right, I should be keeping a closer eye on her." Carol said.

"All the same, Andrea's right. You should not let him talk to you like that," Lori backed up Andrea's point that had opened up after Daryl's outburst.

"If you don't want to say anything to him, I will if you want," offered Andrea.

"If you don't, I will. Daryl needs to learn-" Lori began.

Carol held up her hand to interrupt Lori, when she saw the proceedings over by the tin cans.

"What happened?" She asked, kneeling down by Sophia.

"It's not a good day," Sophia answered in hushed voice.

She didn't mean it in the way it was used in everyday conversation. It was code. It meant there's too much noise, too many people, too much I can't control and I cannot handle it.

Carol accepted the band aids from Carl and took Sophia into their tent. The isolation decreased the panic almost immediately from Sophia's eyes. She teared up a little at the sting of antiseptic but her mom was really quick about it.

"Daryl told me you were pretty far from camp." Regardless of what happened, Carol had to address the current problem. "What were you thinking?"

"I wasn't," Sophia mumbled, picking at the edge of tape.

"I'll say you weren't. You of all people should know better," said Carol. "Not tonight, but tomorrow, you're going to do the dishes ok?"

Carol wrapped her arms around Sophia and curled up with her on the cot. She kissed her head. "I can't lose you again, Roo. My heart couldn't take it."

"I'm sorry."

_But Roo's gone._

* * *

"Can I sit?" Carol asked Daryl, who had retreated behind his tent.

Ten days ago, she would not have noticed how dejected he looked as he pulled feathers off one of his catches.

While Carol had been tending to Sophia, Lori and Andrea had tuned him in on the way he had spoke to Carol. Their hearts were in the right place but what they had failed to consider was, that in high strung way of his, so was Daryl's. He had only been trying to help. She hated having Daryl think he had done something wrong.

Carol watched him plucked the feathers off the grouse. She saw that there was no special technique to it and picked up the second one and started ripping out the feathers.

"Careful with the flight feathers. I'm gonna try and make some arrows," said Daryl quietly. He only

"Thanks for telling me about Sophia." Carol said, "I don't know what got in to her, wandering that far, it isn't like her."

Carol had seen her daughter grab the ice cream bucket and go over to the trees but didn't think it was anything to worry about.

"Yeah, I was surprised to see her out there. She normally sticks pretty close to you."

Hearing him say that was comforting assurance she wasn't a neglectful mother.

"Does Sophia have OCD?" asked Daryl.

Carol's soft features hardened and her fingers picked downy feather off the grouse's breast one at a time as she contemplated what to say. Given her breakdown an hour ago, Carol suspected that she might be addressing this more and more. It would be good if she had an answer. "

"Ain't my place to ask, was just wondering," Daryl semi-apologized when she didn't respond.

"No, no, it's alright." She gave him a reassuring smile while cursing Lori and Andrea for making him so gun shy.

"Sophia has a hard time dealing with stress and it gives her OCD tendencies."

Daryl's hand froze in the middle of stripping the bird's wing. _I don't really get it. _

"Sophia's like a car that's alarm goes off when it's bumped or in large clap of thunder. How she tries to turn off that alarm off is by distracting herself, normally through organizing something as you saw at the woodpile. She can get stressed out if something's out of order because she connects orderly with being calm. But it's not full blown OCD because it's not a constant tripper of that alarm."

Daryl nodded and went back to plucking feathers. He was by no means a fast learner, especially when there was no physical repercussion, but Carol's explanation helped him wrap his head around it.

"She's always been that way. I rarely ever had to tell her to clean her room. All her toys had a specific place."

A memory of Sophia's bedroom flashed through Carol's head. At the end of everyday, right before bedtime, Sophia would put everything she had played with back. All the stuffies sat on the end of her bed, organized according to what plushy animal were friends and they took turns sleeping up by Sophia. Storybooks were lined up in the bookcase, held up at the end by an angel figurine. The dolls in the dollhouse were tucked in to their beds, the mom doll would be in the nursery with the baby in her arms.

"I should've been worried about her behavior from the start, I just thought it was because I was neat freak. My mother was and it rubbed off on me and my sister, Jane, not my youngest sister, Rachel though. She was the black sheep." Carol kept talking while they worked away.

"It got really bad when she was about eight years old. Sophia got to the point she could hardly function. I used to get almost daily phone calls from the school telling me to come get her because she having panic attacks."

The memory of her two younger sisters faded to a memory of a young Sophia resting her head against the window in the rearview mirror of the Cherokee. She was absolutely drained by whatever was going on inside her head that she frustratingly couldn't explain because in her youth she didn't have the words to.

"Our doctor told me, it might help if I put her into an after school activity. We tried Brownies for about two weeks, but it was too much like school, too much chaos. So I put her in ballet. It was the perfect outlet for her because it's so structured and requires a lot of concentration, could tire her out," Carol continued, "it began flaring up again right before all of this. I've been thinking maybe it's her age, starting to get in to puberty. I'm really worried about her with the way we're living now. Sophia can barely cope with it and I don't know what to do, feels like I can't do anything."

Life with Ed made Carol feel constantly powerless but in that situation she could handle it. But being powerless when it came to her daughter was unbearable.

"The past two days have been good," Daryl said tentatively.

He didn't know what constituted a good day for Sophia but after the woodpile he watched her as often as he could. He didn't see her have any sort of freak out which had confused him as he thought these compulsions of hers should be constant.

It was coincidence that he phrased close to her and Sophia's code, like he understood. Carol felt a sense of relief even though nothing had changed except that she kind spilled her guts to Daryl.

It was hard to think much of Daryl when the Dixons rolled into the quarry, not with the way his brother was. But getting to know him, the way he stepped up to find Sophia. Carol's view of him had done a one eighty.

"Hey Daryl," Carol rested her hand on his knee, "I really appreciate you looking out for her."

"That's what we do, ain't it?"

"In that case, can you help me put the cover back on our tent? I took it off to air it out and can't get it back on,"

"Yep."

When they were both holding naked birds, that looked more like aliens than birds. They went over to the Peletier's tent, which was only a stones throw from Daryl's.

With Sophia back, it became too crowded in the RV so the two of them moved out to a tent. He came close to asking Carol if they wanted to bunk in with him. He had more than enough room for the two girls. There were a number of reasons why he didn't.

One, he'd have to physically get the words out and he couldn't do it. Two, Carol would decline and then he'd feel damn stupid. Third, Sophia wouldn't be able to handle it.

Not only was he a guy, he could be a messy guy. The kid would have an aneurysm sharing a tent with him.

"Here." Daryl held out the photo that he had taken to remind Shane and anyone else who they had lost. "Meant to put it back but forgot."

_Forgot for three days but you've been carrying it around your pocket? _By some miracle Carol managed to keep her eyebrows level.

"Do you want to keep it?" She asked.

Daryl did have an odd attachment to the photo because of what it symbolized. It was like a postcard of the quite possible the best thing he had ever done in his life, which was save the girl in the photo.

"I want you to keep it," said Carol.

* * *

For all it's danger, the forest felt tranquil with the sun filtering through the trees in a thick, almost touchable golden light.

"Remember that place out by Mamaw's and Papaw's?" asked Sophia, once again picking berries. She was trying to be

Since she hadn't found many blueberries, Carol offered to go with her after dinner along the trees to find some more. Daryl wasn't about to let them go off alone. He ended up guiding them into the forest to a patch he'd seen earlier.

"Oh yes," answered Carol. "Remember the sasquatches?"

"Yes."

The lack of berries wasn't the reason Carol offered to go out. Sophia was still looking pretty anxious.

Sophia didn't mind Daryl being with them but she was too scared to make eye contact with him.

"We use to go out to this farm outside of Dawsonville and we told Sophia that if she didn't stay close that sasquatches would carry her off. We were more worried about bears but if we told her there were bears, she'd go looking for them," explained Carol.

The bucket had gotten to be a quarter full in no time, even with Sophia and Daryl eating half of their find, staining their tongues and teeth blue.

The sound of undergrowth being trampled spooked them. Carol grabbed Sophia, who was in the middle of hiding behind her. Daryl got in front of both of them with the crossbow raised.

"Good news. It ain't a sasquatch," said Daryl, lowering the crossbow.

The Greene's horses were out grazing in one of their farthest fields. (Rick had kept his word on not going far.) Four of them were up near the fence. They eyed up the human arrivals with their ears perked up with interest before going back to chomping on the grass. Sophia pulled up long stalks of grass by the fence and fed one, petting it's neck as it tugged the stalks out of her hand.

"Mummy, look," Sophia pointed out into the pasture. "See that brown one, he's kind of got black socks. That's Memphis. That's the one we rode back."

Sophia tried her best to give her next bushel to a shyer horse that kept getting chased off by another. Carol pulled some stalks and led the brash one away. Daryl stowed the crossbow on his back and followed suit.

"Fuck off, Nellie. Me and you ain't friends," said Daryl as a familiar horse face came up to say hi and take the grass from his hand.

"What's this ones name?" asked Sophia, feeding one with a white stripe.

"I only know Nellie and Memphis."

They longer they stayed by the fence, the more horses they attracted to them except for a few, including Memphis who a few yards away. Sophia was trying to get him to come over.

"Sophia," Daryl held the wires apart. "Go on, they ain't gonna eat ya."

She hesitated for half second then Sophia climbed through the gap. It felt weird to be on the same side as the horses. They seemed so much bigger. It was kind of scary. The overly friendly Nellie walked right behind her as she walked through the field. Feeing Nellie's breath and presence behind, Sophia turned around. Nellie jerked back, Sophia startled at the beasts very sudden movement, then laughed it off.

_You and me got something in common. _Sophia thought.

"I got it," Carol placed her hands between the barbs knowingly from her rural childhood. "You're gonna get tangled in the fence."

Daryl took off the crossbow and dropped it on the other side of the fence. An inquisitive horse sniffed at it, and pulled at the strap, spooking itself when the crossbow moved toward it.

"Ladies first," countered Daryl.

Carol took his offer and carefully went through the wires.

Sophia walked up to Memphis. He remained still when she reached out to stroke his soft nose. Timidly, Sophia moved in closer to him, Memphis reciprocated by lowering his head to hers.

It was the first time in a long time that Carol saw Sophia completely drop her guard as she became solely focused on the horse.

Daryl watched Carol and Sophia mingle in the small herd of horses.

There was something about the two that had drawn him in before Sophia went missing. He tended to think of women as belonging to two categories. There were the ones that were higher up in the world with picket fences or professional jobs, like Lori and Andrea, then there were the ones is his realm, the loud ones that Merle picked up. Carol didn't fit either. Then there was the way she was so protective of Sophia, always holding her close.

They had to be the most vulnerable people in camp. Everyone else could shoot or were with someone who could. These two were largely on their own.

Carol and Sophia needed him. He liked that.

* * *

Author's Note:

Woot new chapter and cover.

Thanks so much for the kind words and thoughtful responses, all of you are so intuitive and love hearing your thoughts. _Guest, Chemical Ghost, nblkolt, Kountry101, piratejessieswaby, sammyjase, Lord-Cas, Emberka-2012, Guest, Ihasabukkit, Rising Phoenix416, sonshinedaisy, Nat, Surplus Imagination, Amethiste._

I'm having a lot of fun playing with the minds of everyone here.

Break time (from school) and FBI has begun earlier than expected. Full dets on my page.


	7. Chapter 6

"_That's not my little girl…"_

- Carol Peletier. Nebraska.

* * *

I didn't mean it.

Rick pulls on his coat and tests a flashlight. It lights up brightly and he clicks it off.

"Be careful," says Lori.

She kisses him on the cheek and he smoothes back her hair, nodding.

"We're gonna find him," states Rick to everyone else. He looks right at Mom when he says it.

They walk out the door so it's only me, Mom, Lori, and Carl left in the living room. Plus the people who live here but they're upstairs, except for Maggie who went to help since she lives here and knows the property best.

Mom's playing with her hands, massaging one with the other, like she did at Auntie Rachel's funeral. I think wringing is the word for it. I sit close to her on the couch so that we're sort of touching.

"He'll be fine, probably make it back before the others," Carl says.

"Yeah," Mom agrees softly.

The cut on my hand starts itching. I scratch at it lightly with the second knuckle on my finger to keep from opening up the scab. Mom takes hold of my hand and pats the top of it. She looks at me with her soft blue eyes. "It'll all be alright."

"_He's dead." _

I know that something horrible has happened to Daryl. Because I wished for it. I wished for him to go away. But I didn't mean it. I just got scared is all.

"_And angry." _That voice reminds me.

It's not just a voice. It's like this whole other person in my head. She looks like me, only the bridge of her nose is cut and bruised, and her bottom lip is swollen. Her eyes are so dark that they are all black, no colored part to them.

I know She's not really real. But sometimes I picture Her – not all the time, just sometimes - like She will looking over my shoulder when I'm doing something and talking in my ear or standing across from me, watching.

…_The air from the fridge cools me down. Most of me. The hurting parts are still hot. _

_The grape soda isn't by the margarine. I push back the carton of milk and a jar of pickled beets to see if it's hiding at the back. No such luck. I bend over, resting my hands on my knees to look on the two lower shelves. Cheese, a fruit cup, and some …_

_There's none in the door either, just salad dressings and ketchup. I don't like cool ketchup, room temp. ketchup tastes better and it won't cool off your food but I leave it where it is. _

_I close the fridge and just stared at it. I could kind of hear sports commentator from the living room. _

_What happened five minutes ago on the couch – _

_Grape soda. _

_There might be some grape soda downstairs in the mini fridge. _

_I tip toe over to the stairs. I look down them. It's pitch black. I never liked the dark. It's creepy. So are basements. _

"_Hey," Dad barked. Shivers run down my back. "Git me a beer." _

_A secret. He said before. _

"'_Ey, did ya hear me in there?" _

_I quickly walk down the stairs, into the darkness. In a rush I miss the last step and sort of trip. Our basement isn't finished so the floor isn't carpeted. _

_Above me, I can hear crike, crike, creak, crike. Our house is old as Georgia, the kitchen floor and about half of the hallway creaks loudly when people walk on it. _

_From where the creaks come from it sounds like Dad is walking over to the stairs. I tell myself to move but stay sitting there on the cold concrete, just looking up at the ceiling. Then the crikes go back over to the fridge and then get quieter as they go back in to the living then they stop. _

_I pick myself up and walk to the back, stepping carefully. I would normally put on socks before I would go down because I'm terrified of getting a nail or something sharp stuck in my foot, and getting nerve damage and never being able to dance again. But I couldn't go to my bedroom without going back into the living room. So I risk it. I bump into the pole in the middle. A little further and I'm all the way in the back. _

_I pull the string to turn on the light, it's just a light bulb hanging down from the _

_There are four cans of grape soda in the small fridge. I grab one and pop it open. _

_It's ice cold. Tastes really good. I stop drinking to take a breath and my heart starts racing, I get super hot and cold all at once. The soda bubbles up in my stomach, and then up my throat. I have just enough time to get to the sink over by the washing machine before I throw it up. _

_Splotches of purple liquid run down the white sink. _

_I had lift myself up to my very tippy toes to lean over it and the high wall squishes my belly but I don't put my feet flat on the floor until I take a few deep breathes and know that I'm all done puking. _

_There's an old mirror with a gold frame leaning against the wall. The girl looking back at me has a cut up nose, and her bottom lip has a large bump, and teeth marks. _

I didn't know what she was then, but I could feel that even though it was my reflection, it wasn't me I was looking at. It was some other thing.

Headlights splash on the wall. We all look over at them. There are footsteps on the porch. The door opens but no one comes in. Then Glenn walks in slowly, letting Daryl lean against him.

Happy. I get so happy to see he's alive.

Maggie squeezes by them and goes upstairs. Mom gets on her feet but she doesn't go anywhere. Glenn keeps walking with Daryl. His head is pointed at the ground, so I can't get a good look at him.

Something's wrong.

They go into the bedroom across the hall from the couch. I twist around to look through the open door. Glenn helps Daryl lay down on the bed.

There are voices on the porch, Andrea, Dale, and T-Dog come in.

"He's in shock, broke his collarbone it looks like." Dale explains.

Mom looks back over to me.

_I'm gonna go see to him. Ok? _

I nod.

Mom's so good.

"_How are you her daughter?"_

Maggie and an older man, whose is probably Hershel, come down and go into the bedroom. They close the bedroom door, not completely. I can still sort of see through the crack. Mom is sitting beside Daryl, still on his back. Hershel moves around him. The back of his striped shirt blocks my view.

Mom says that demons can get inside people's heads, make them think and do bad things, and that's what She is; a demon in my head.

I never really knew before if having a demon in your head made you a bad person or it was something that you couldn't help. I know now. It makes you a bad person. She is bad and that badness is a part of me.

A high cry of pain, something like scream comes from the bedroom.

I did this.

* * *

A/N:

Serious thanks to NatLaufey for the cover she made of Carol telling Daryl to keep the photo of Sophia in the last chapter.

Find it on her Deviant Art account: stuff-i-do .deviantart art/DH-cover-363525568?q=gallery%3Astuff-i-do&qo=0

(Don't take out your leave that in your browser bar thing.)

It's awesome and that's not all. I strongly recommend checking out her gallery, so many good pictures. Have you ever wanted to see Meth? Not the drug but the ship of Merle and Beth. Now you can and it is beautiful.

Or if your computer dislikes Deviant Art like mine does seventy-five percent of the time, she also has a tumblr account. iwanderhere. tumblr. com

Thanks for the amazing reviews, y'all really give me some great things to work with. _War90, piratejessieswaby, sammyjase, JackAndHoney (thanks for also giving me a good poke), Chemical Ghost, Emberka-2012, Ashvarden, GemmaTellerSoa, 6747, Kountry101, Surplus Imagination, gypsykl79, NatLaufey, and wolfgal97_.

Tiny chapter, next one won't be far behind. I wanted to get your reactions to basically see if it sort of makes sense, next chapter will be how they get back to the Greene's and Daryl's accident, which serves the plot, I'm not just picking on him.


	8. Chapter 7

'_Cause hells broke loose in Georgia, and the Devil deals the cards. _

Charlie Daniels Band. Devil Went Down To Georgia.

* * *

The tent poles snapped.

The once dome shell caved in around them.

_Garr, gurgh, yarg. _

The protests of hungry walkers filled their ears as their unseen heads tried to poke into the tent, causing large bumps to unnervingly hit against them as they pressed themselves in to the ground.

* * *

They were everywhere.

They all woke up to the heart stopping cracks of gunfire as Andrea, the on duty watchmen, started taking out as many geeks as she could on top of the RV.

It wasn't a herd but a swarm of walkers. While there was nowhere near the number of bodies in a herd, they came out of nowhere so suddenly as if someone kicked over a hive of geeks.

Andrea stopped popping off shots when Rick, Shane, Daryl, T-Dog, Glenn, and Dale began to intermingle with the crowd of walkers (she had learned her lesson, the absolute hard way). She only climbed half way down the ladder and jumped down the rest, beating a walker's head into a bloody pulp with the butt of her gun very shortly after reaching the ground.

She didn't know where to go. Every time she spotted a walker it was being taken out by one of the guys.

"Ahhhh!" someone screamed behind her.

Andrea turned around to see a walker was closing in on Lori.

Time didn't speed up as Shane said that it did. It slowed down, everything almost stopped, she heard Rick call out for Lori. In his face, Andrea could tell that he knew he wouldn't make it over to his wife.

The gun felt heavy in her hand. They were too close together, if she missed she could hit Lori but if she didn't take the shot at all, the walker would bite her.

Andrea raised her gun, she took a deep breath, took aim and blew a hole through the walker's skull. It was too dark to see the brain matter spray. It crumbled over at Lori's feet. She looked over at Andrea, mouth opening and closing, gaping like a fish.

It may be extremely petty, especially in the current circumstances, but Andrea couldn't resist give her a condescending look.

_Leave it to the men, huh? _She thought and hoped expressed on her face.

Even though the situation was way less than ideal. That felt so good.

As quickly as they had arrived, they exterminated the walkers. Rick ran over to Lori and hugged her, Carl came from out of nowhere to hug his mom as well.

"That was some good shooting." Shane said quietly coming up behind Andrea. "Thank you."

She wasn't sure how she felt about that.

A quiet rasping directed them to a pair of overlooked geeks on top of a collapsed tent, they were grabbing handfuls of the canvas with discombobulated, clumsily stiff hands, bringing it to their mouths to try and rip it open with their teeth like the tent was a stubborn candy bar wrapper.

Andrea and Glenn were the closet so they quickly ganked the walkers silently and without much thought. She started doing an informal survey of everyone. Her heart jumped a bit when she saw Dale clutching his hunting rifle on the other side of the pummeled heart of their camp, taking count of everyone as she was. He looked disturbed at something over her shoulder.

Daryl was kneeling on the devastated tent, next to a body shaped bump. Andrea and Glenn went back over there and scrambled to help Daryl find the zipper to the opening flap of the tent. The rest of the group came over and watched on.

"Carol? Sophia?" Andrea called out.

There wasn't an answer. They froze for a moment. Daryl took his knife out of its holster about to make a new entrance when Glenn found the displaced opening and pulled the zipper back.

Carol was lying face down, perfectly still. Daryl ducked inside. Tentatively he rocked her shoulder.

"Hey," he mumbled.

Slowly Carol raised her head, revealing her daughter tucked underneath her. If any pair of teeth had breached the tent fabric, they would have to go right through her before they got to Sophia.

The almost ultimate sacrifice left the mother extremely shaky. Andrea supported Carol as she got to her feet outside the tent, Sophia crawled out after her, and then Daryl. As Andrea and Lori checked over the mother and daughter for bites or scratches, he hovered very nearby.

The full moon gave them a eerie amount of light for the middle of the nights, light that bounced off the whites of their eyes as the whole group stood around in their vandalized camp, strewn with immobile corpses. Déjà vu was strongly present in the cool night air as they all flashbacks to the attack at their fish fry. But this time they were whole. They would only be burning come morning. They wouldn't be burying friends.

In the distance, there was the distance rumbling of more gunfire.

* * *

He may have lived in town, had a beer with the boys at Patton's bar, served by Lou Bush or maybe he was just visiting some relatives. There had been a new car parked in the Smyth's driveway lately. Or maybe he just aimlessly walked here. Whoever this man had been before didn't matter. He was here now and he wasn't alive.

None of them were.

Hershel took one out with a shot to the head, then another and another. His girls huddled behind him, Jimmy with a hunter's rifle stayed near them, Patricia, at his shoulder, hit one in the chest and it kept staggering toward them, completely un-phased as it didn't need its lungs or feel pain.

The walkers had come in through the backdoor, so they made their way to the front door. Maggie opened the door, Hershel and Jimmy had their guns at the ready but it didn't matter how ready they were, there were too many on the porch, too many that were now aware of the living residents, turning toward them in a stiff synchronized movement. They came shambling towards the open door. Hershel and Patricia tried to clear a path for them with a few shots but they closed in before long. Jimmy shoved one with the butt of his rifle. It created a domino effect and knocked over two others, which slowed down the others but pile up disabled Hershel and his family from making their escape outside.

They retreated back in to the house and up the stairs as it was the only place they could go. The walkers had gathered around the staircase. More walkers came in from the front, joining the ones from the back door. They bottlenecked at the base, trying clumsily to climb up the stairs with their staggered walk, those that made up the first step were shot.

Jimmy got tripped on the stairs when a walker grabbed his ankle through the spindles on the banister, he pulled out of it's grasp on his jeans and slipped on the step. He tumbled down into the open jaws of the dead. They were on him before anything could be done. His screams were indescribable, they stopped suddenly and the void was filled by the sound of snacking walkers.

As horrible as it was for them to lose Jimmy in such a way, it gave them a much-needed distraction to escape. They got into Maggie's bedroom without the walkers knowing they had taken a step.

Maggie, Patricia, and Hershel moved the dresser in front of the door. Beth stood in the middle of the room, shaking like a leaf. Maggie had to physically move her to the far side of the room where they all then sat against the back wall.

Waiting.

Would the walkers remember their other prey after they were done their last meal?

In the morning, they might be able to escape out of the window, like Maggie use to do when she was fourteen. That is only if the farm wasn't completely overrun beyond their doors.

They had no supplies up here. They wouldn't be able to live in this room.

Eventually there was the heart-stopping sound of heavy footsteps walking by the door. Beth buried her head into her father's shoulder, he raised his shot gun at the door. Beside him, Maggie and Patricia had a very hushed conversation about Patricia's lady Smith & Wesson pistol.

The roar of an engine blared outside. Hershel peeked out the window above his head. Coming up the drive was a singular headlight, followed by a pair of headlights.

It couldn't be…

But the motorcycle, the raucous noise that Hershel heard the next morning after Rick Grimes showed up with his son, a shattered bullet in his guts, signified that it was in fact Rick's group.

When the engines went quiet. Maggie popped the screen out and crawled out on to the roof ledge. She warned someone on the ground below about the cluster of walkers and reported that they were safely tucked away in her bedroom for now.

Thuds, and thunks, gunshots and a crash came from down the hall. Light jumped under the crack of the door for a quick moment. There was some more noise, the murmur of voices and then a gentle rapping at the bedroom door.

They, except for Beth, moved the dresser back, out of the way of the door. Rick and Glenn helped them from the other side once they could squeeze through the door. Once it was clear, Maggie hugged Glenn.

"I'm gonna get 'round to saving your life someday," she said after thanking him with a public display of affection.

"Ah no worries, I like doing it," Glenn said.

Silence.

"Thank you," said Hershel.

Rick nodded. He looked exhausted as did Glenn. Daryl leaned in the doorway, not looking as tired, more out of breath like a coyote after running down a calf. It became apparent that they were the only ones that came. Perhaps there weren't as many walkers as he thought, it was hard to count in all the chaos. Maybe there hadn't been a lot but it had been more than enough to overwhelm them.

That was the truly scary part of the night. How unprepared they were. How weak.

"Where's the rest of you?" Hershel asked.

"Three or four miles down the road," answered Rick

Why they had stayed so close, Hershel didn't know but he knew that they were extremely lucky that they had. Three or four miles in any direction would be exposed.

"Bring them here." Hershel said.

It was no longer the Christian thing to do, it was how they were all going to survive.

* * *

Shane sat by the open door of the Winnebago with his shotgun in his lap.

Everyone was quietly sitting inside the , even Andrea who would characteristically be complaining about being left out of a chance to prove herself, was quiet.

Due to very recent events, Rick had wanted to the majority of their forces to stay behind, taking a special ops team as it were to go see in the Greene's were alright. Obviously Glenn could not be told to say behind, but then Rick had picked Daryl over Shane.

He knew that he had brought some of it on himself for what he did out at Hershel's barn, but he was still Rick's partner. Him and Rick had been in a number of tight spots while they were small town sheriffs. They could communicate without talking.

The hillbilly had been sneaking in on his belly ever since his brother got his worthless ass left behind in Atlanta. That's what the whole business with Sophia had been about. Daryl was trying to get in good with the group, make them forget what he was by being the delusional hope that the group didn't want to let go of for Shane's realistic plans that would keep them alive, making Shane out to be heartless in the process. For that Shane couldn't help but be a little bitter towards him. Perhaps more than just a little.

Finding Sophia had made him a big damn hero, which he definitely deserved to be and Shane was sincerely glad that he had been wrong about finding Sophia alive. The problem was it had made Daryl prouder than a rutting buck, and that pride made him challenge Shane, like that little quip of 'know that you were wrong' when they happened across each other on their way back to camp the first night he had brought Sophia back.

If Rick started feeding that pride, it was going to be a problem.

No use dwelling on it now. It was over and apparently done as car came up the road. The motorcycle it left with did not accompany it. Rick got out of the driver's seat.

Glenn hopped out of the passenger seat, looking confused as the tents were all packed up. Rick looked around the empty ground with a hard look on his face, then up to Shane.

"We're going back to the Greene's," said Rick in a very clenched manner of speaking.

He knew that Shane was planning on moving their camp regardless of Rick coming back with that bit of news.

Shane cursed silently. He was hoping more for a we're-not-wanted-there-so-we're-finally-going-to-m ove-on-as-we-should've-done-days-ago.

"Where's Daryl?" asked Shane

"Doing a lap around the property, making sure we don't get caught with our pants down again tonight," explained Rick.

Of course he was.

* * *

A walker suddenly materialized in front of him.

The speed he was going was too much to pull off a turn gracefully or at all successfully. The back end fish tailed on the loose gravel, the motorcycle keeled over, Daryl slamming into the ground, shoulder first. Pain. An explosion of pain coursed through him starting at his shoulder and then through the rest of him as it hit the ground. For a few seconds he thought he was going to puke up their dinner of grouse with a side of rice.

The walker he had almost hit came ambling over in its drunken stumble. The crossbow was somehow still in a spot on the back of the motorcycle, which was pitching a revving fit on its side, Daryl didn't free it but he managed to get it aimed and launch a bolt through the walker's head as it leaned over the motorcycle.

Making a gun – technically crossbow stand – off the motorcycle would've been badass if he weren't a messed up, heaving wreck that he was.

The forest's edge never looked so sinister to Daryl as it did then. There could be a herd of walkers out there and he wouldn't know. More to the point he was…broken. Vulnerable.

He shut the motorcycle off with a flick of the keys and then curled up beside, under the walker slumped over it. If any other walkers went past, hopefully this would be good enough to hide him. Hiding was the only thing he could do.

Daryl kept his face buried against the cool ground, breathing in the fresh grass smell to keep the stench of dead flesh out of his nose.

When would someone come looking for him? What if he was out here all night?

His body was throbbing, he still felt a little queasy, and ice cold. Daryl pressed himself as far as possible against the motorcycle. The motor was still warm.

A cliché coyote howled in the distance.

The heated metal heart started to get uncomfortable on his skin, but he didn't move because he knew that it would eventually fad and it was all he had so Daryl clung to it.

* * *

To say the Greene's house was a mess was a huge understatement. A mess was spilled cheerios, muddy paw prints, and glitter. This was a train wreck. Bullet holes in the walls were the least of the damages. There were blood splatters on the wall and the floor. The worst was the walkers that they couldn't move it outside. They would wait until it was safe to dispose of them in daylight hours. For now they covered up the bodies with a tarp.

It had felt like forever since they had left to go find Daryl after he still hadn't met up with them.

"He'll be fine, probably make it back before the others," said Carl, offering a very optimistic smile.

"Yeah."

_If there is anyone who deserves to be in your Grace, it's Daryl. He's done so much and asks for nothing in return. _Carol prayed.

Her daughter, sitting beside her, was staring off into space. Carol had become familiar with the expression. It was all in her eyes, her face would go slack, void of any emotions, but her eyes seemed to quiver, were strained from whatever torment was going on her mind.

Carol ran her fingers through her fine golden hair. Sophia didn't respond to it. She had retreated into her own little world. Sometimes it was the quiet before the storm. She would come back in to the present and would start cleaning or organizing in a frenzied state.

It had been going on for a few months before the End, Carol consulted with Ed about it once, expressing that perhaps Sophia should see a doctor like she had when she was young. But Ed had quickly snapped that they weren't going to spend a bunch of money to find out that she was just being a moody preteen.

But it was something more than hormones. She had pulled away from her friends, showed little interest in ballet, and her episodes became more frequent and frightening.

Carol felt powerless to this face that was silently begging for help. No matter what she tried she couldn't get through to her daughter. She had locked away her problems as well as a large portion of the child Carol knew.

* * *

The chassis of the motorcycle caught the attention of the Mercury's oblong headlights.

"Daryl," Glenn called out.

Daryl sat himself up. Glenn and Maggie came up to him so he tried to put a lid on the shivering.

"You okay?" asked Glenn.

" 'M alive. Think I broke somethin'," Daryl said. He prayed he didn't actually sound as pussy as he heard himself say it.

"Dad will be able to patch ya up. C'mon" Maggie said.

Glenn and Maggie very carefully, like as if he was ninety-nine years old carefully, helped him on to his feet and into the car. He slumped over in the backseat, resting against the door.

They pulled up to the house after the worst quick trip down a gravel road. He got out of the car by himself, holding damaged arm tight to his body with his other arm and walked about three steps to the porch. Walking jarred his frame enough for it to be completely shake up the bone no matter how tight he tried to hold it together. Daryl looked over the steps, going up them was going to be a bitch.

Andrea, T-Dog, and Dale were all up under the porch light. They stopped their conversation when they saw him leaning against the post.

_Oh goody, a audience_, Daryl thought as he prepared to mount the porch steps. He caught a whiff of cigarette smoke.

"Can I bum one of those?"

T-Dog passed him a cigarette over the railing.

"Layed the bike down. Popped something right in here," Daryl lit up and rubbed the afflicted area.

"That sounds like your collarbone, very easy to break," Dale said.

They talked a little but the conversation felt forced. Daryl wasn't really bothered by it, there wasn't much outside of his collarbone that could. Everyone was sort of giving him weird looks, thinking that he should go inside and get seen to instead having a smoke. But he needed it after all the moving it took to get this far. He snubbed out the butt of the cigarette under his boot and prepared to take on the stairs.

"Hey, let me help you man," Glenn offered.

"I can do it," Daryl growled

He gave up after the first step and took up Glenn's offer of support right into the bedroom off the hallway. He gave up trying to have any shred of dignity and let Glenn put him on the bed. It actually wasn't all that comfortable lying down. Daryl didn't think there was anyway to lie comfortably so he didn't move.

Hershel came in. The farmer's blue eyes looked tired but the shock of the evening had looked to wore off. Daryl opened up his shirt so Hershel could see it.

"The good news is the bone didn't break through the skin," Hershel tried to give him a silver lining.

_Still fucking broken _Daryl thought miserably.

"Can I come in?" He heard Carol ask but couldn't see from his position.

_Your call, _Hershel looked at him.

"Yes," Daryl answered.

He was mostly dressed this time. But it wasn't like he had anything she hadn't seen before. That night she brought him up some dinner, he had tried to cover up his bare back but didn't get the sheet up or roll over quick enough and she saw the scars on his back.

Carol appeared by his side. She was looking at him with that same gentle look that she had that night. That's what got to him, was that she saw the scars, he got the feeling she knew what they meant but didn't look at him with pity.

"I gotta set the bone," Hershel said

Before he can process what that meant, he felt the absolute worst pain of his entire life as Hershel pulled his arm in the opposite direction, and the bar had been set quite high by breaking his collarbone in the first place. Daryl screamed.

Carol's delicate features may have turned to pity there. Hershel's definitely had pity on his face. Daryl pitied Daryl at that moment but mostly because he was going to be embarrassed for screaming like that later on.

Hershel brushed over his hairline and looked at the stitches on his temple. It felt like the ravine all over again.

_Are you wondering why these things keep happening to me? Cause I sure am, _thought Daryl.

But this was new. Oddly enough Daryl had never broken a bone before. There were plenty of times when he should've; the time he fell out of a hunting blind, getting in too one to many fights, his father…

Maggie came in with some familiar looking bottle of painkillers. She also had a perfectly square cloth. Daryl shook two pills into his hand and threw them back. Then Hershel adjusted his arm to being crooked in the sling.

"It doesn't look like you hit your head. But there is still a worry of repeat trauma to the brain. He'll need to be monitored tonight." Hershel said.

That was sort of a scary statement. The pills got caught in his throat.

"I'll stay with you tonight," Carol said to him.

That was much more of a comforting statement. He wasn't going to be staring up at the ceiling all alone. That helped the jagged pills in his throat slide down.

It had occurred to her earlier, when they were out in the pasture with Greene's horses that Carol didn't know anything about Daryl.

"Where did you live?" asked Carol.

"Fifteen minutes outside of Juno."

Carol wasn't sure if the clipped answer was because Daryl didn't want to talk. So she tried another.

"Live on a farm?"

"What gave it away?" Daryl said. "Actually we lived in town when I was young, didn't move out to the ol' Dixon homestead till three or so years after my grandpa died when our house burned down."

That was a bit more open. Carol wanted to ask about that out of curiosity but she had to keep him focused on happy things if she could. "Grow crops?"

"My Dad weren't much of a farmer, he leased our land to ranchers for their cattle for a few years, then we took up bordering horses. Some good money in that. I kept it up when I was on my own. Where are you from?"

"I was born and raised in Dawsonville," Carol said out of habit. Although she had been living in Canton for the past nine odd years.

"No shit. I've been there. It's quite the place."

"What do you mean by that? And keep in the back of your mind that's my hometown you're talking 'bout."

"It's just so small, I blew right through it when I came out there to look at a quad, had ta turn 'round," said Daryl. "Pretty little place, very coz-homey."

"Coz-homey?"

"I was wanted to say cozy but than I wanted to say homey too and just said both," Daryl explained.

Carol laughed. Daryl blushed, looking down but looking over to her a few times. She was smiling like they weren't in the place they were.

"Coz-homey," Carol repeated in a light laugh.

"Hey, ya gotta be nice to me, I'm broken." Daryl defended himself.

They sat reveling in their little joke in a comfortable silence.

"Did you eat at C.J's Diner? I had lunch there, had some kind a soup and sandwich special, it was really good." Daryl said,

"Of course I did. Did you see the church on the hill right off the exit?" asked Carol.

"I think so."

"That was my father's church."

"Shoulda known you was a preacher's daughter,"

"What gave it away?"

"oh I dunno, just makes sense when ya say it," Daryl said. "That prayer ya said in that church when Sophia was missin'-"

Carol's heart stopped. What she had said in that plea for forgiveness was not meant for others to hear.

"I didn't hear all of it but it was – I don't know – I never heard anybody pray like that before. Could tell that ya have really strong faith. I'm not making sense, am I?" Daryl rambled.

* * *

Daryl had finally fallen asleep, he seemed to be fighting it for a while even though it was where pain couldn't get to him. It was going to be awful to have to bring him out of it to see if he could remember his name, his brother's name, her name, she'd probably ask if he knew her daughter's name as well. Carol really couldn't think of other questions.

Their conversation, while it had been the longest one the pair had ever had, didn't turn up much on him. Daryl would answer questions but didn't give much away. Once they got on Dawsonville, they didn't get off it with Daryl asking questions about her life there.

While he was a sleep, Carol took the opportunity to make a small trip to the bathroom. The living room outside had taken a different shape as everyone had set up a bedroll. Hers and Sophia's sleeping bags was perfectly rectangles align with the foamy underneath and pillows on them were placed so perfectly they looked like they were out of a advertisement. She didn't see her daughter but as Lori and Carl were gone as well, she knew that Sophia would be with them

She pushed the ajar door open, thinking no one was in there. Andrea was in there, but only staring at her reflection in the mirror over the sink.

"Sorry," Carol apologized about to shut the door.

Andrea looked over at her, she looked to be frozen at the mark of ten seconds from crying.

"Oh hun, what's wrong?" asked Carol, coming into the bathroom.

"I just keep thinking about Amy," she said in a hushed voice. "If I had learned to shoot before maybe I would've been able to save her and she'd be here with us today."

Carol hugged her.

"You can't do that to yourself. You can't torture yourself with the if only's. There is only what is."

* * *

A timid knocking at the door brought Daryl out of his light sleep. His eyes hit on the empty chair where Carol had been sitting.

_Knock, knock. _

"Yeah," he answered.

Sophia crept into the room. It was the same bedroom that she had slept in when they had spent the night. Only this time it was Daryl in the bed. She had that feeling that she shouldn't be in there. Not after what she had done.

"Hey," croaked Daryl, He looked sick, and pale.

"Wanted to say goodnight to my mom," Sophia explained to her toes.

"She stepped out," said Daryl. "Sorry I'm stealing her from ya. Yer more than welcome to stay."

"Naw, I already got my bed all set up in the front room. Right by Carl, we're gonna read ghost stories."

Sophia straightened a wrinkle out of the blanket. Then scratched at her shoulder.

"You doin' okay?"

_Of course you're not. You've been scared ta death for the past week. _Daryl looked at the angry red mark on the small shoulder.

_I broke your collarbone, _Sophia thought.

"Yes."

When Daryl had last seen Sophia in their broken tent, she had been in her pajamas but since then she had changed in to her clothes. She had even combed her hair back in to a clip with a little blue butterfly on it.

Dressed to receive company. Like a right, proper young lady. He was taken back to coming back into the bathroom after bathing her. Sophia had curled up under the towel and fallen asleep on the floor. He sat her up against the wall to put his shirt on her and she just seemed so doll like.

"_You found a doll…" _He heard Shane growl in his head.

"Is my pack in the house?" asked Daryl.

"Umm, I dunno. I'll go check."

Sophia went back out into the sitting room. She looked over the backpacks in the house, most were at the end of a sleeping bag. She had seen Daryl's pack before. It was tan with three big pouches on the front. It wasn't in the house.

They had moved the couches against the wall. Dale was sitting on one of them and he was the only one in the room who wasn't busy and that she had an easier time approaching him than most others.

"Daryl needs his pack, I think it's in the RV," said Sophia.

"No problem," he said.

He went out to the front door with T-Dog, Sophia waited by the door. They gave her backpack and she went back into the bedroom and set it down on the bed beside him. Daryl looked in the front pouch, not finding whatever he was looking for, he undid the top zipper and started rummaging through it, turning up a lot of shirts with plaid pattern.

"Don't go nowhere," he said when she started to take a step.

Sophia rooted herself to the spot obediently. She couldn't stop looking at the sling that Daryl's arm was in.

"Think this is yours," Daryl pulled out her doll out from the bottom.

When Sophia reached out to take it from him, a static shock nipped at both their fingertips. She hugged the doll close to her.

"Thank you," she said quietly.

He was glad he had stolen it out of fear that Carol had lost hope and would throw it out. In a small way he wanted give that doll back to Sophia as much as he wanted to get her back to her mother. Daryl could tell from the way she held it that the doll that it meant something to her.

And he was right.

_Whenever I got sad, I would go to my bedroom and hug one of my stuffies. I would remember happy memories, like Maline, my golden monkey with the Velcro on its hands and feet so they stuck together. Tiffany, Jo, Emily, Mary Anna, and Jessica all had monkeys too and we all wore them around our necks or on our backs like they were our babies. Our fifth grade teacher, Ms. Kutcher, was so cool, she let us have them in class but one time we had a mean sub and she took our babies away. I helped Curtis put glue on the teacher's chair during morning recess. Wasn't so tough with a bunch of glue on her butt._

_When we had to go to Atlanta, all my toys got left at the house. Which was fine, I was getting too old for them anyway. It's just without them, I have a hard time remembering good things. I knew they existed but I couldn't think of little details sometimes, and it was impossible when I was upset. _

_Eliza gave her doll to me because she felt bad about my dad. She thought I was sad about it. I wasn't. I didn't feel anything the moment I found out he was dead. It wasn't till the next morning that it sunk in. _

Daryl watched a slender smile slowly dawn on Sophia.

_He couldn't hurt me any more…_

* * *

Author's Note:

_JackAndHoney _cracked the whip on this story, and I was all like Dark Horse is an abused animal. JK, thanks for the poke.

Thanks for all your input and kind words that keep me going; _6747, Chemical Ghost, JackAndHoney, Emberka-2012, wolfgal97, sonshinedaisy, HGRHfan35, Sira1, NatLaufey, GemmaTellerSoa, SilverWolf84, sodapop765, I luv ewansmile, Runaway Fantasy Princess, itsi3, DerpPaws-McReedus-Caryl-LOVER, Dixxxon. _

I was shown by my good buddy, h8erade, how to do links so they are not butchered to the point you can't retrieve it. Below is the cover Natlaufey did for this story, I love it so much, I can't describe it so go see it.

stuff[dash]i[dash] DH[dash]cover[dash]363525568

Copy and paste in to your website typey bar, (I forget its name, I know its simple) and remove put a real . or -

For anyone who is concerned over how "disturbingly well done" this is written, know that I've had quite a happy life, good relationship with my father, so not writing this from a past experience or anything like that.

However since y'all have shared with me, I will tell that you that I am an anxious/depressive person at times. I was on anxiety medication a few years ago when I had a bad episode. I was so stressed out, could barely eat and because of that I had no energy so I was sleeping all the time so I basically became a fainting goat, (look 'em up on YouTube). Anyway that's my story


	9. Chapter 8

_Late one night, sorrow come round  
__Scratching at my door._

_But I cut my hands  
__And break my back  
__Draggin' this bag of stones_

Kasey Chambers ft Shane Nicholson. Rattlin' Bones

* * *

The porch swing creaked as it gently rocked back and forth. Sophia sat in the corner of it with her doll beside her and _The Yearling_ in her hands but the words were out of reach.

She wasn't a strong reader to begin with, and the dialect that the novel was composed of converting it to modern day speech worked her mind pretty hard. Hardly having slept at all last night made it impossible and she found herself going over the same sentence again and again.

Everything was so new and strange, the room and every single person being in there, overwhelmed her. Any time she got close to going to sleep, the house would creak or someone would cough or grunt or get up to go to the bathroom and that would wake up the demon who would start chatting in her ear.

Sophia deserved that.

From over the picturesque green fields surrounding the farmhouse, the sun started reaching up on to the porch but only enough to lie over half the porch, leaving the porch swing in the cool shadows. Sophia put the book face down to save her spot even though she was going to have to reread, she got off the swing and climbed up on the railing and sat on the top to feel the sun on her skin.

The concentrated warmth seeped down in to her bones. She had always loved the feeling. Sophia closed her eyes and just basked in the morning rays.

"You're a early bird," a voice behind her made her jump and nearly fall off of her narrow perch.

Rick came over to stand by the railing. "I used to be like you 'til I reached about thirteen an' then there was a no getting me up before noon. I think Carl's reached that point a little earlier."

"Yeah, him and Glenn. I couldn't figure out how they slept so late in a tent. We'll never get 'em up now," said Sophia.

Rick smiled and nodded.

_I like Rick. He has his own family to take care of but he is always doing his best to look out for everyone. Like how he came here last night even though we had been kicked off and told we couldn't stay. I don't think he did that just so we could move back but because, like Jim said, 'he's a police officer, probably just came across some folks needing help'. We don't really need to worry about obeying the law anymore but we all need to be protected. _

"Lori's making some breakfast," said Rick. "You should go in and grab a plate."

"I'm good, thank you."

The screen door opened with a clatter. Shane walked out, popping his POLICE baseball cap on his shaven head.

"Good morning," he greeted her.

"Morning," she returned the greeting.

_Shane was good too. He was the one who set up the camp in the quarry, that was no easy job with us all so scared and running around like chickens with their heads cut off. _

_He did way more than that, I still had to thank him properly for what he did…_

* * *

His knuckles were throbbing, the ruts in between them felt like they had grown new veins so that they could have their own pulse. Shane rubbed them, he hoped that Ed's face felt ten times worse than his hand.

Rage flared up inside of him when he thought of that piece of shit. Rick was going back for a similar scumbag right now. The difference between the two, Ed and Merle, was that Shane never should've let the Dixons in. The brothers could hold their own, unlike Ed's family, a wife and a young daughter. But that meant they could shoot and on top of that hunt.

It was actually the Dixons that had brought the domestic abuse case going on in their camp to his attention.

Shane had been getting into a heated argument with them about being too loud, especially with their language. When Merle had remarked that he wasn't the one beating women and went on to point out the bruise on Carol and Sophia's shy mannerism. Daryl stepped up next and told Shane that if he didn't handle it, they would. Not only was Shane surprised over how steely Daryl got, Merle gave him a what-the-fuck look but heartedly agreed that they would handle it and it would be ugly.

Shane looked up to see the girl that Merle had said wouldn't let ya near her holding out a blue-labeled bottle of heaven.

"I heard you saying that you missed having pepsi. I found this in our car," Sophia explained. "You can't drink it right now but if you leave it outside tonight, it'll probably get cold enough to taste alright."

"Thanks, honey." Shane took the bottle from her.

He wasn't sure what she was up to with this. He had just beaten up her father and here she was giving him the last soft drink. Maybe she thought she had to appease him.

Sophia cast a look over her shoulder with a snap of her neck a couple of times. She was very alert, basically to the point of being twitchy. She could be trying to reach out to someone who she knew could help her, just didn't know what to say.

"Hey Sophia, your dad lays another hand on your mom or on you, you come tell me. 'Kay?" said Shane.

The girl's eyes went wide, she curled back like any frightened child fearing reprimanding from a abusive captor. He hated to admit but the Dixons were right about her, Sophia's mannerisms reeked of being mishandled.

"You won't get in to any trouble." Shane reassured her.

She opened her mouth like she was going to say something but closed it. She clutched at her hair and looked back over at her camp.

"He'll never know you told me anything," Shane continued.

Sophia nodded, only as a gesture that she understood what he was saying.

"I'm fine," she said.

* * *

The two partners talked about what they should be doing today; checking fences and their vehicles and other chores, some thing about trip wires and flares that Sophia didn't quite understand. What she felt was the whole conversation was tense. Shane walked off in a definite mood.

_He has been acting different since I got back. _

"Sophia, I don't think you should be out here by yourself, why don't you go back inside?" said Rick.

_Cause I don't belong in there. _

"Yes sir," complied Sophia.

"Thank you," Rick said.

She hopped off into the grass and then backtracked up the steps, collected her doll and book and did as she was told. What she was always told now.

_Go back and be with everyone. Forever and always. _

"Hey," Sophia called back to Rick. "I could take inventory of what we got for food."

"That'd be really helpful. Thank you."

_I liked Rick a little less for sending me in. When I'm around everyone I have to act normal and pretend that I'm okay even if I'm not feeling that way at that moment. _

Sophia went in through the front door. There were a few less lumpy sleeping bags on the floor. She stashed _The Yearling_ and her doll in her carefully organized pack and grabbed a blue erasable pen and the green coil notebook that she used for math. But before she went to take inventory of the pantry, she went in to the bedroom to check in with her mom. Carol was sleeping the chair, her head crooked over to her shoulder like a bird.

Her daughter's close proximity set off her mother alarm and she woke up.

"Good morning, sunshine," Carol greeted, yawning.

"Do you need anything?" asked Sophia.

"A hug from my beautiful girl," Carol reached out to her.

Sophia gladly took the invite to curl up in her mother's lap.

_As bony as Mom is, I'm always comfortable cuddled up to her. I think if Mom was as fat as Tiffany's mom, we wouldn't be as cozy because I wouldn't be able to fit up on the chair with her. Also she wouldn't be able to give the best hugs in the world if she was as big as Tiff's mom. _

"How is he?" Sophia stole a quick look at a sleeping Daryl. She had avoided looking at him because the guilt made her queasy.

"He's on the mend," answered Carol.

Sophia rested her head against her mother. The demon appeared leaning in the doorway. Maybe she couldn't come in here, Sophia hoped.

"_Haven't you done enough?" _She asked.

Sophia didn't answer. She only got worse when you paid her any attention.

"He's not in a lot of pain?"

"I don't think so," Carol said.

"How are you so sweet without melting in the rain?" Carol tapped her nose.

_She's not. She's really only asking so she can stop feeling so bad, _said the dark eyed duplicate leaning in the doorway.

"Gosh Roo, you look exhausted." Carol pet her head. "I know it must have been hard for you to get any sleep last night. I'm sorry I wasn't with you."

"It's ok," said Sophia.

"He looked harder for you than anyone else," said Carol lightly. "Stubbornly refused to stop and wouldn't let me lose any hope that we would find you. The day he found you, he wasn't even supposed to go out, supposed to be resting but as soon as he knew no one could go out because we had to move our camp, he stole a horse and took off. You weren't going to spend another night if he could help it."

_It made sense to me that Daryl would go farther into forest than anyone else, he spent the night out there when we were in the quarry. But I didn't know that. I just supposed that everyone just split up and looked around the woods. Like so many times before I wanted to ask why me? Only I meant it different this time. _

The warmth of her mother overcame the whirring of her mind, even made the wicked girl in the doorway go away and Sophia was able to shut down her mind and had herself a badly needed nap. She was woken up prematurely when Carol started to shuffle.

"Put 'er right here," she heard Daryl say.

"Are you sure?" her mom whispered.

"Yeah."

Sophia was briefly aware she had been on her feet but it was over so fast she wasn't sure it happened. She was aware-ish that she had been moved to a bed but didn't really care until she woke up to a; "psssst, psst, pst."

Over the bump of a pillow she saw a fluffy gray cat batting something. She sat up and saw the moving bump under the covers that was Daryl's hand as he played the position of mouse in a literal game of cat and mouse. Sophia had seen that cat before, it had crept downstairs to investigate all the new people in it's domain. Andrea had reached out to pet and it hissed at her and ran away.

_Mom says that people who animals like are more honesty or trustworthy – I don't remember what it was she said. The gist was of it was if an animal likes you it's a sign that you're a good person. Daryl had so many chances that night, I was naked and tired and near starved to death. But he didn't do anything to me. I was still kinda nervous being beside him. _

"Do you need anything?" asked Sophia, kicking back the blanket.

"Nah, I'm good," Daryl answered.

The cat got a hold of the bump and started biting down into it. Growling in a grunting way.

"Does it hurt?" she asked.

"Nah, blanket's pretty thick."

"No, your collarbone?" She had to know.

"Depends, as long as I don't move to much it seems alright." He said softly.

_I bet it hurt a lot. I never broke a bone before but my ankle had just stopped hurting and it was only twisted. Daryl had done so much for me. Why did I do this to him?_

"_That's an easy one." _The dark eyed one had crossed the threshold of the door into the room. "_You're so dirty you can't help but mess up everything else. Especially when you put your vile little mind to it. Don't you remember? You were freaking out about the cans and you wished him gone." _

"I'm sorry," Sophia blurted.

_I didn't mean to. I was scared. _She defended herself.

"Whaddya have to be sorry for?" He asked, taken back.

She had the chance to confess what happened. How she got scared of his observant nature, scared that he knew what no one could.

_Don't worry he doesn't no know. _ _Obviously no one does, dummy. If they knew, they wouldn't let you be here. _

"I'm just sorry this happened to you," she chickened out.

_A secret he said. _

"Yeah, you an' me both," Daryl grumbled.

He stopped playing with the cat and laid back and looked up at the ceiling. Sophia could see his Adam's apple move as he swallowed. She could tell that he was upset, had that air about him, she wasn't sure if that was because he really was in pain even though he wasn't saying or if it was what she said.

Like she told Rick she would, Sophia went into the kitchen and started taking stock of what was in the pantry. She had started with the top shelf and moved down from there. Just as she was about to hit the second shelf from the bottom she had to turn the page.

_Funions- II_

Since the bags of the odd one hundred percent artificial onion rings were on the shelf above and were not cans either, she wrote it on top of the margin. To properly take inventory she had to pull down all the cans so she could count them.

_Heinz Baked Beans- __IIII_

_No Name Beans- I _

_PC Blue Menu Soybeans- III_

_Chef Boyardee Ravioli- _

The clatter of dishes made her jump. Sophia stopped counting cans of ravioli and peeked through the pantry door into the kitchen. Maggie had entered the kitchen, Patricia had been in there for awhile, occasionally looking at the

"How's Beth?" asked Patricia.

"Awful. Won't eat. Can hardly get her to talk. She's distraught, worse than she was after Mom died, after the barn. God Patricia I don't know what to do." Maggie said.

"Well I know what both your parents would say," Patricia paused.

"Don't use the Lord's name in vain. Maggie, you're doing all you can. She'll come around in her own time."

_I didn't know who they were talking about. But I was happy to hear of it because whoever this Beth was, she would distract everyone from me until I get it together since I wasn't allowed to be alone anymore. It's better that way. If I could be alone for a little while. _

"_Can't hurt anyone either."_

Sophia placed a can of ravioli up on the shelf beside the beans.

_One…_

* * *

_Today minus forty-one days. _He thought, staring up at the ceiling.

Daryl was determined not to get out of bed. A rare decision for him but desperate times called for desperate measures that went to running the risk of getting bedsores. He figured the stiller he was the better the bone could knit back together.

But his bladder had other plans. He prepared himself for pain when he sat up. Much to his surprise, his collarbone didn't pulsate anymore. It ached a little but nothing like the last night. Walking wasn't an agonizing exercise, going up

He had tolerated worse. That time he fell out of a blind, he severely bruise his tailbone. A tailbone is not something you think moves around a whole lot until you hurt it, then you painfully learn that your tailbone is at the core of every single movement you make.

The collarbone apparently wasn't. Walking was doable now, even the stairs.

It was also lucky that it had been his left side, and not his right. He would be completely capable of carrying on with it for six weeks.

Instead of going back to the bedroom after he went to the bathroom, almost as easy as he would've if he wasn't gibbled, he wandered outside where Rick, Shane, T-Dog, and Carl were loading up planks of wood in the back of a pick-up.

"What we got goin' on here?" he asked.

"We found the broken fence where the walkers came through, we're gonna fix it up first, and then get going on the rebuild project."

"Good idea," Daryl inspected the planks. They were good, thick and sturdy but there weren't enough of them. "Have to make a run into town an' get some more."

"Yeah we already found a hardware store in the town, and got big lumber yard on flagged on the map the next town over. Prolly go out there tomorrow."

He hung around while they were loading up the last of them. He knew that lifting anything would be too strenuous but hammering only required one good arm when you really got down to it.

"You coming with us?" Shane asked with a tone that said you shouldn't be.

"Yeah I am," answered Daryl with responding tone of you have a problem with that.

Rick stepped between them as they started to advance toward each other to properly get in each other. From over Shane's shoulder, he could see T-Dog shake his head.

"I think we got enough man power. You're off this afternoon, enjoy it," said Rick.

"Hammering ain't hard work," Daryl walked off to the driver's side door. "I'll drive, I've seen how y'all drive stick, hard to get repairs done now, don't think Hershel would appreciate ya fryin' off the clutch."

He wrenched the door open and hopped into the driver's seat. T-Dog and Carl climbed into the cab with him. Rick and Shane sat in the box. It was tempting to try and pitch Shane out. He started up the truck and drove off at a slow, steady pace.

Driving was a little trickier than getting his dick out his pants. Since his right arm had to shift gears and do the majority of the turning of the steering wheel as well the ride got pretty bumpy and jerky when they had to turn off the gravel road and into the field but he didn't stall it and that was all that mattered.

He didn't need much direction since they were driving through an open field and it was easy to see where the fence was broken as all the barbed wire was hanging off like those annoying strings that come off your clothes and you can pull them forever.

Three post were pulled right out of the ground, Daryl pulled over next to it. He knelt down in the dusty dirt. There were a lot of tracks and it would take a lot of geeks to unravel this fence as it was meant to hold livestock of over a thousand pounds.

There weren't that many walkers in the Greene's house last night and this herd was not a part of the one that had tore through their camp.

"After this, we should take another look around the property. There is a lot of unaccounted for walkers," Daryl said quietly to Rick.

Rick, T-Dog and Shane worked on putting up the two new posts in the old holes while him and Carl got started converting the good for livestock barbed wire to a solid barricade.

The sling greatly reduced how far Daryl could extend his arm, and he couldn't place the nail very well at the top, after a couple tries he finally got it to stick in the wood.

As soon as he hit the nail, it spiraled off into the tall grass but he found it after Carl had done a whole plank by himself. When the posts were put back in place, all of the boys were putting up boards and being boys they had to start a competition. Daryl spent a lot of his time looking for nails in the grass and had his ass handed to him.

_At least you're still helping, _he consoled himself, _who cares how fast you work?_

"Think it's time for a smoke break," said T-Dog after a while.

"Hell yeah," agreed Daryl.

As courteous smokers, they moved down wind from the others who didn't.

"When did you start?" asked T-Dog after his first drag.

"Around fourteen."

Daryl kicked himself for answering honestly. He had the chance now to quit being redneck trash and he was blowing it.

"I think I was about fifteen," said T-Dog. "All the older boys in my 'hood did and I had to too to impress 'em."

"Same. First time was actually in a field like this one. I was helping brand calves out at my neighbors and the older boys pushed me into it."

"How did you get cigarettes?"

"Merle, when he was around, and stole them from my pa when he weren't. You?"

"I use to steal them from my Moms."

Two things struck Daryl in that conversation. The referral to the 'hood and how he called his mom, moms. He had heard other people use those words. People like him. So T-Dog may not have come from the best background either.

_He grew out of it though. _Daryl thought.

They went back to the fence. T-Dog would get the nails going for Daryl so that he wouldn't hit them right off. It was embarrassing but he didn't have to play find a needle in a haystack anymore and the nail supply lasted longer.

Unwilling to admit that all this activity was killing him as a throbbing ball of heat lit up his whole shoulder. Daryl saw it through to the end and then he drove them back to the house to get some guns to go on a geek hunt.

While they waited for Shane to grab the guns, Daryl thought about going inside grabbing his trusty crossbow but he would only be able to take one shot with it since he couldn't reload it. The thought of asking someone else load it almost physically hurt him.

"Dad, can I come? Please? There's nothing to do," begged Carl, who they were going to drop off.

"What's Sophia up to?" asked Rick.

"She organizing cans or something," Carl continued to whine, "Remember how good of a shot I am. Shane tell him."

He didn't hear what Shane said but it convinced Rick as Carl excitedly jumped back into the truck and then raced out to ride in the box.

"It'll be better if I ride in the box, be able to get a better look." Daryl gave up his driver's seat.

"You sure you want to come?" asked T-Dog as Daryl pussyfooted out of the cab.

"Got to," Daryl said.

The truck ride was like walking after he broke the damn bone all over again. Daryl fidgeted the knot of the sling at the back of his neck. Maybe it had come loose and that's why the jostling was now getting to him.

"Can you see if this is coming undone?" Daryl asked Carl.

Carl pulled at the end of the knot to test it.

"Nope," he said. "My friend, Spencer broke his collarbone. He had one of those dark blue slings with Velcro."

"Yeah I've seen those ones."

"Maybe when Glenn or someone goes to town, they could check the pharmacy for one."

"Yeah, maybe."

Daryl scanned the horizon, trying not to think about his pain.

"Spencer didn't have to wear it very long."

"Kids heal faster. Enjoy that."

"You're not that old," Carl said.

_Feel like a fossil, _Daryl thought over his aches and pains.

They took a safari tour of the Greene's fields that included the pasture where the cows grazed. Much to Carl's visible disappointment, they didn't find any walkers. While it worried Daryl, he was fine with going back. His body had had enough.

"There you are," Hershel said when they walked in. "You are really overdue for pain meds."

That explained a lot. Daryl felt his stomach drop and hit his intestines like a rock. So he wasn't fine. He was just numbed to pain so he thought he was.

As if it were a secret, he snuck upstairs to the bathroom and took his missed dose. The painkillers made him sleepy, which was the perfect excuse for Daryl to leave the others in the sitting room and sulk back into the bedroom to have a nap.

He would've stayed in there for the rest of the day if he had been allowed to eat dinner in there but he was denied room service and had to go eat downstairs with everyone.

At the awkwardly silent table, Daryl hardly looked up from his plate. He wouldn't be able to keep his cool if he got another look of pity. When his eyes did get bored of watching his plate, they would go over to Sophia's and watch her cut up her meat loaf, asparagus and potatoes into perfectly even pieces.

Her knife cut through the silence with a grating noise as it scrapped against the plate. Everyone looked over to her for a moment and then went back to eating.

"I have to go to bathroom," she excused calmly.

The abrupt way she left was not so calm.

* * *

Daryl woke up early the next morning. That was more like him.

_Today minus forty days. _

He walked down the hallway, past the room filled with sleeping bodies in bags all over the floor, into the kitchen.

The bottle of painkillers from his brother's stash was too big to fit comfortable in his pocket so he put a few into a Ziploc baggie to keep with him for the rest of the day.

His plan for today was to not miss his meds. Daryl had only started degrading when he didn't have any painkillers in his bloodstream. So if he kept them in his system he'd be able to help out still.

"Morning son," Dale greeted.

"Mornin'"

Daryl really appreciated that Dale didn't ask him if he needed any help when he was making coffee. Old age had not dulled Dale's mind as far as Daryl could see. The old man probably knew how much Daryl was hating everyone's special treatment of him.

On that understanding, they had a pleasant conversation while he waited for the others to get up to go for the lumber run. At the very least he could be a lookout.

That was _his_ plan.

"Daryl, you're not coming with us." Rick's plan was different.

"What?" he snapped.

T-Dog, Glenn, Shane, and Andrea who had convened on the porch made a speedy exit over to wait by the truck.

"You over did it yesterday. You know you did," Rick said trying to look Daryl in the eyes who was trying to avoid eye contact.

"I'll be fine. It's not like I need someone watching me, I don't need to be taken care of –" Daryl spoke fast as he tended to do when he was thrown off.

"No but you do need to take care of that arm so that it heals right."

Daryl had gone from thrown off to floored and when he was floored by something he was silent.

"What would you rather sitting out for the next few weeks or having that arm crippled for the rest of your life. If you keep pushing it that's whats going to happen," continued Rick.

He hadn't ever thought of the long term. Daryl had just thought that it would go back to normal no matter what, it was only a matter of weeks. Rick was right. If Daryl fucked up his arm, there would be no surgery to fix it in this new world.

"You're staying here." Rick said with unnecessary finality.

And so Daryl was left behind with the elderly, women and children, staring at the dust rise on the gravel road as they drove off. He was pissed.

At everything.

Knowing he couldn't be near anyone, Daryl went for a walk. He found some good, light branches for arrow making. That was something he could probably do on bed rest. But he didn't

Obviously Daryl knew why this had happened. But it still seemed so unfair.

When he came back to the house, Sophia was watering his motorcycle (since Daryl had been fostering the machine for a while now, he was referring to more and more as his instead of Merle's) with a watering can. When he got a little closer he could see the foamy suds sloughing off it.

She froze in the middle of giving it a spotless towel dry and looked at him like she was afraid she was going to be in trouble.

"This thing has never looked so good in it's entire life," Daryl circled the motorcycle.

The metal and especially the chrome caught every beam of sunlight and threw it back at him. Sophia's smile ran a close second in brightness as she went back to wiping it off with careful attention.

She unscrewed a tin of turtle wax.

"Hey, ya don't have to do that. It looks great."

"I'm bored. Keeps me busy." She said as she rubbed the wax in small circles on the chassis.

He knew that she wasn't bored. She had to do a perfect job to shut that alarm in her head off.

Daryl hadn't noticed this peculiar creature much in the quarry; she had a way of staying out off the radar. Daryl paid special attention to her. Sophia, much like him, didn't want everyone's attention. So he knew last night when she left the table last night at dinner, she didn't need to go to the bathroom. She was upset. She probably felt ashamed when everyone saw how she had cut her food.

Daryl's pity party stopped. Seeing what Sophia had to deal with, what he was going through didn't seem so bad.

* * *

_Today minus thirty-nine days._

Daryl thought about marking the bedpost like a prisoner. Staying in bed didn't bother him. He felt kind of cruddy today. The hours of painkiller dependency wasn't agreeing with him and had hardened his stomach and abdomen.

It's not like it mattered.

Like the stages of grieving, and maybe Daryl was grieving how he use to be, his anger had dissolved to depression.

The cat came in and laid down with him. Purring like a motor when he gave it a scratch behind the ear.

When he got bored of lying there. Daryl dragged the crossbow over on to the bed and began inspecting it and it's bolts to figure out how he was going to make more arrows. His furry friend batted at the strap.

"Thought you might like some coffee," said a delicate voice.

Carol came in, holding to steaming cups. She sat with him for a while and they continued their conversation from the night she stayed by his side about their rural upbringing. The continuation of Carol's story was that she was actually living in Canton before the end of the world, they had moved there for Ed to find some work. He was a used car salesman. Carol waitressed at a diner.

"How about you take a nice hot bath, probably feel good," said Carol after their conversation.

"I don't do baths," Daryl said as he went back to fussing with the crossbow again.

"A shower?" Carol persisted.

"Are you trying ta say somethin'?"

"Yes I am."

"What?" Daryl played dumb.

"You're getting a little rank."

"That never killed nobody. Once when I hunting I didn't shower for six days."

"You're not hunting right now."

_Or anytime soon _Daryl thought and he'd bet that Carol was also thinking it.

"If you need help getting your shirt off - " she offered.

"No need 'cause it ain't coming off."

"So you're not going to bathe for six weeks," Carol gave him a skeptical look.

"That's tha plan,"

Carol gave up and left him to his devices.

Damn that woman, a shower was now all he could think about. It would kill some time. So he went up to one of the three rooms that he ever went into in the house.

Daryl held his arm up in the same position in the shower.

_What if it doesn't heal right? _He kept looking at it.

Getting his shirt back on was the most difficult of all the everyday things he'd done since it had to involve moving his arm. He wasn't going to risk maiming it forever because he was too stubborn to ask for help.

Daryl stood with the door cracked open for thirty seconds before he had the courage to call Carol.

She came up, was happy to see he had cleaned up, and very gently, helped him loop his left arm through the sleeve hole and then she buttoned it up for him.

"How about I give this a quick wash?" She picked up his sling.

Daryl nodded. Now that he was clean, he could smell the potent B.O on the cheesecloth. If that was anything to go off of, Carol was being nice when she had said 'pretty rank'. He had forgotten that showering was more for the benefit of others.

He followed on her heels into the second room he was ever in, the kitchen. The white bubbles jumping out of the sink as Carol scrubbed the cheese cloth reminded him of her daughter.

"How's Sophia doing?"

Carol didn't get the chance to answer as Lori came in.

"Looks like I owe five dollars," said Lori. "Doesn't that feel better?"

"Yeah, hot water was all it took to mend the bone," Daryl said sarcastically and snarly.

Lori and Carol both scrunched up their brows.

_Do you have to be an incredible ass hat? _He asked himself.

"Sorry, I haven't taken a shit in three days, my guts are killing me, guess I'm getting cranky."

The two housewives exchanged some sort of look that clearly said something to each other but evaded him. Daryl was about to apologize for sharing too much information with them.

"Well is that all it is? Why didn't you say so?" said Carol.

"When you go out a week without taking a crap, you can come crying to me," Lori said.

"Um?" That was not the reaction he was expecting.

"When I was pregnant with Carl, I was so bunged up, I thought I was gonna explode before I had him," explained Lori. "My obstetrician told me when I was on toilet to sit with my feet up on a stepper, don't know if it helped but won't hurt."

"I was the same with Sophia. I don't think I ever prayed to poop before," laughed Carol. "A tip I picked up was to squeeze a pillow to your belly."

"You two could write a book. How to take a crap by Carol and Lori."

For the next ninety seconds no one could talk or breathe.

"There needs to be a book on what really happens when you're pregnant," said Lori. "They make it look all cute on TV."

Daryl got the quick and dirty lowdown on what happens to you during pregnancy. It was really tiring, and your feet got huge along with everything else.

"Here I was worried I was gonna gross y'all out," Daryl piped up when they started to talk about hemorrhoids.

"We're mothers, it's gonna take a lot more than that," laughed Carol.

That was the moment Daryl's perspective on woman would be forever split into two categories, mothers and women without children.

"And back to your problem,"

Carol left the kitchen and came back in with small bottle of clear liquid that read

mineral oil in blue.

"It's not as good as milk of magnesia but it'll do the trick." She gave it to him. "Take a shot of this before bed, you can put it in milk if you like, and you'll be right as rain."

Carol patted his good shoulder. Even though he still wasn't in a great mood and was what you might call touch aversive in general. He didn't mind so much.

"If it don't work, have Hershel take me out behind the barn and shoot me 'tween the eyes. I'm useless anyways."

* * *

Author's Note.

And after all that I end on the subject of constipation.

I hope I made you laugh a little. You all deserve too since you made me smile; _war90, Jack And Honey, DarylDixon'sLover, HGRHfan35, ladyh77, I luv ewansmile, Chemical Ghost, Emberka-2012, N3v34m0r311949, SilberWolf84, BanannaFlvdSnow, Surplus Imagination, and h8erade. _

A memo about brands; Funions are like popcorn twists but garlic-y and are circular and they are in America because they were on the American show, The Killing. If you don't have the Heinz or No Name brand beans in the States, or anything else I mention from here on out, rest assured I don't care. (Uncouth but it takes me long enough to write without inane fact checking)

Next Time on DARK HORSE: Sophia finds a place of solitude and something even more.


	10. Chapter 9

_I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship…_

- Casablanca (1942)

* * *

"Eight…seven…six…"

Panic hit me in the face as I stared into a cupboard full of glasses and mugs.

_Crap._

"Five…four..." the count down got closer.

I rushed over to another cupboard, sliding out on the tile floor thanks to my socks. Thankfully I found the plates. I brought seven down on to the counter and then made two trips to the table just outside the kitchen so that I wouldn't accidentally drop them.

"Three and a half…three." Mom counted down

The smell of the creamy batter cooking on the stove top was enough of a reminder that time was running out. I raced around the table to place plates in front of Andrea, Daryl, Dale, Carl, and in two empty spots for Mom and Lori.

"What are you doing?" Carl asked.

"The microwave game, where you have to get everything set up before the timer goes off, but this time it's more like the pancake game." I explained without stopping. (Almost bonked Dale in the head with his plate.)

The pancake game wasn't as intense as the microwave game because the microwave didn't stop counting for you as I knew Mom just did.

I raced back over to the drawers, I already knew where the cutlery was so I got it out pretty quickly and gave everyone their utensils.

"I had to find a dish to microwave at every meal when she was young just so she could play," Mom brought in a plate full of delicious smelling pancakes. "But she never complained about having to set the table since it was Olympic event."

"Gold medal champion," I brag jokingly.

I poured maple syrup on to my pair of pancakes, that overlapped each other so that they kinda looked like butt cheeks. I laughed and started cutting up the butt and laughed a little more at that.

Today was going to be a good day, I could tell already. It was right there in the air.

Everyone around me seemed pretty happy too. When we first got here, no one was all that sure on what to do. Now with a few days under our belts, we were more comfortable in the house now and so everyone was talking now instead of being quiet as we were the last few suppers.

The only thing that would make it perfect would be if we had a radio in the background. Absolute perfection would be if it were playing Bruce Springsteen, felt like a Boss kind of day.

"...One night we were having one of our socials so we, me and my sister, Rachel, and some other kids we hung around with thought of it as the perfect opportunity to sneak across the creek what with all the adults busy visiting," Mom was telling a story I had heard more than once. "The mosquitoes were awful down there and we got eaten alive trying to realign the old planks on what was once the bridge. For once nobody's parents came cruising down the road so we actually got to hang out on the other side for a while and no one was any the wiser about it. But the next day, Rachel and I were scratching ourselves silly so we go ask Mum if we had any of that anti itch cream and she told us where it was and then 'there is bug spray in the ottoman for the next time you are going to go down by the creek."

I laughed with everyone else even though I knew the ending. It was still a good story.

"Because it had been a dry summer, the only place there was mosquitoes was down by the water. So moral of the story, you two," Mom looked to me and Carl. "A mother is always going to figure out when you are doing you shouldn't be."

Conversations split into little groups after that. Mom was retelling another story to Daryl , the one where we got stuck in the muck when we were trying to go to my Papaw's church and Randy came out to help us but the road was so bad he almost got stuck too.

"Git the Chev unstuck when the Dodge showed up?" He asked

"But the dodge got stuck in the tractor rut," Mom answered.

"Which eventually pulled out the Ford," Daryl nodded.

"Yep. I got me stuck in the mud, so I couldn't rehearse. And Chavez too has missed his work. Reggie, he now fears the worst, he stood up his ex wife she called him a jerk. Course Holtman didn't have nothing better do to," Mom said.

"'cept ranch," They both said and then burst out laughing.

They must have gotten friendly with each other when I got lost and Daryl spent all that time looking for me. And I think Daryl reminded her of Randy, and Greg Peters and all the other men she grew up with. Good ol' boys.

I didn't feel super guilty around Daryl anymore. He was doing better, wasn't lying down in the bedroom all the time. So I think that helped, seeing that he was doing ok. There was something sad about him though, probably because he couldn't be with Rick, Shane, T-Dog, and Glenn right now, and he always had to stay behind because of how hurt he was. Since that was my fault, I wished there was something I could do about it.

It was a good thing that the whole group wasn't eating with us because from the look of the stack of dirty dishes in the sink and a tub beside, we might not have enough plates for everyone.

I looked at Mom's cup of coffee hopefully. Mom looked over at me looking at it.

"Alright, but just a small cup," She read my mind as she often had a knack for doing.

I went back to the cupboard with the cups that I found while looking for plates and picked a smaller tea cup with blue daisies on it.

When I use to help with breakfast at the diner in Canton where Mom worked, which was run by a friend of Auntie Gracie, who ran CJ's diner back in Dawsonville. Me and Shayla, who was sixteen, would drink it when we were waiting around for something to do. For the longest time I didn't like the taste but I drank it anyway because I wanted to be like Shayla, then I got use to the taste and ended up liking it.

I put two spoons of sugar in, tested it and added a little more. Maybe I didn't get use to the taste, I just figured out how much sugar I needed to put in to get rid of the bitter taste.

I took big sip, glanced over at Mom, she wasn't looking so I refilled the coffee in my cup and added more sugar.

Mom said it wasn't good for a growing girl like me so she didn't let me have it very often and when she did, I could not have a whole lot of it. She was probably right about that because sometimes when I have coffee, my heart goes crazy and I feel like I got to run around or I'll explode.

I returned to my seat. In the time that I was gone, most of the maple syrup had run off my pancakes in a little river that pooled around the edges. I dunked a bit of pancake into it.

We should have cheese fondue for supper sometime.

"My arms are killing me after all that lifting the other day," said Andrea.

"Having trouble keeping up with the boys?" Lori sort of asked and sorted stated too.

All of a sudden I got a really cross vibe coming off of Daryl.

It's hard to explain how I could feel when someone else is angry before they even speak but I really can. The closest way I could describe the way it feels when you _feel _someone's mood is when you get close to a space heater and you can feel the bubble of heat coming from it. Moods have a different kind of energy though. I tried telling my friend, Emma, back in the third grade but she said I was making things up.

"I'm going to go see if Beth wants some," Lori put a few pancakes on one of the last plates.

I still hadn't seen this Beth that kept being mentioned. I was guessing she was an old lady since she had to stay in bed so much.

"Hey Andrea, could you take Carl and Sophia for a walk around the farm?" Mom asked when we started clearing up.

Me and Carl looked at each other excitedly.

"They've been itching to go exploring."

We had been itching like we had touched poison ivy to run around the big, open fields around. But our mothers kept us busy with schoolwork. Carl kept wanting to show me the chicken coop. I don't like chickens. I got pecked on the finger by one once for doing nothing. Chickens are nasty. He said that there were some cute little chicks though, I would like to see them.

"Sure," Andrea said with a smile.

Me and Carl high fived which made Andrea smile even more. At least I cheered someone up.

"Thank you." Mom said. "Here, I'll give you a canteen of water to take down to the others. It's shaping up to be a hot day."

"Daryl, do you want to come?" Carl asked him. I felt glad that Carl thought to invite him along.

"Naw, I got some stuff to do."

While we waited for Carl to get dressed, Dale showed Andrea something on the hunting rifle. I had gotten dressed when I first got up. I don't like to be in my PJ's too long. Bad memories.

We walked out the door and down the dirt road. Carl asked about the hunting rifle across Andrea's shoulder and then the gun that was hers. I didn't know a thing about guns so I enjoyed the view that I only got to see from the windows and feel the warmth from the sun that I got to enjoy on the porch if I was lucky.

A bunch of cows grazed in the field. There were some right up against the fence. Carl walked up to them slowly. They raised their head when they heard us but didn't walk away. So we pet them through the wire. They didn't seem to mind, just kept chomping on the grass.

The horses were what I really wanted to see. Unfortunately we went all the way down to where the guys were all building a brand spanking new fence and didn't see any. Must be farther out.

The fence was getting big. That ought to keep the geeks out.

We hung around for a while, sitting on the hood of a red pickup. I could see a

It was too big to be a shed, but the doors were way too small to get a combine in. It was probably a stable. With all the horses the Greene's had, they would need some where to keep them, wouldn't they?

I wanted to go see it.

"Let's head back," said Andrea, then rolling her eyes, "I should help out with laundry or something

"Can I stay?" Carl asked. "I could get my math done later."

"Yeah. I'll handle the wrath of Lori." Rick said.

Andrea and me walked back through the field we came. We talked a little bit. I looked back over my shoulder when we got back to house. I couldn't see the stable with the barn right in the way of it.

"You're a quiet girl, Sophia." Andrea said.

"Don't got a whole lot to say."

* * *

I tapped my pencil on the table. I had to write a whole frigging page on the first discussion question in the back of _The Yearling, _which was actually three questions in one.

_Why does Penny Baxter choose to live in a remote clearing?_

_Cause he don't like to lend his neighbors tools. _I had wrote down but erased.

How should I know? I don't think I had read far enough to know why he didn't want to live in there instead of the little pioneer town.

Maybe I could make my neighbour answer work. Since this wasn't math, there was

The Forrester's seemed like a bunch of crazies.

I thought about the house I found when I was lost and how I wanted to live in it. But I wanted to live there for completely different reasons than someone who lived forever ago.

My Papaw liked Dawsonville because it was quiet and humble, he felt like he could be closer to God

Was Penny a man of God. I flipped through the first ten pages but I didn't pick up anything

This was frustrating as heck.

It didn't help that I kept thinking about the stable. I really wanted to see it and I wasn't going to get anything done until I did.

I snuck out the back door and walked around the barn. The grass tickled my legs it was closer to the house than where Carl was helping with the fence so I didn't feel

I came around the side of it and poked my head in the door. I was nervous, like I was going into a place I wasn't allowed to be in. I crept in.

It was cooler than outside since it was out of the sun. I could hear my footsteps since it was so quiet. It smelled like most places on a farm, sort of like cow poop, but there was sweet smell in there too which made it way better than cow poop smell.

There was a walk-in closet with saddles and blanket. Bridles and thick, colourful ropes hanging on the wall. I walked to the other end. Memphis was in a stall. I hopped over the half door and walked up to him slowly. His big, soft brown eye fixed on me but he didn't rear up or anything crazy. He stretched out his neck and nosed my shoulder. So I took it as sign that he was fine with me being there and stroked the side of his head. He liked it too, not like the cows earlier that didn't notice.

"Why you in here all by your lonesome?" I asked him. He could be outside if he wanted. "You needing some peace too?"

He looked out to the field over his tall shoulder.

"Bet all that hammering is driving you nutty. They'll be done soon and we'll all be safer for it.

I told myself I wasn't going to stay long so no one would know that I had gone off but

The stable was everything I had been wishing for. So I kept petting him, pretending that he was really my horse.

"Alright, I gotta go now but I'll come back later." I told the horse.

I'd have to get Mom to agree somehow. It was within the new fence so it was safe.

I got even closer to Memphis' chest, I swear I could feel his heart beating. I reached up around his neck and gave him a hug. I was scared that he'd kick me but he was too nice for that. Instead he lowered his head down on to my back, like he was hugging me right back.

"He's your favourite, huh?" Daryl said, coming out of nowhere like he had a knack for doing.

Who was he? Batman.

He, like most everyone, also had a knack for telling me to go back.

I nodded. Memphis was my favorite, not because he was really the first horse I ever rode but because he was a beautiful. I liked how his coat kind of tricked you into thinking it was black when it was really just a dark brown, except for his legs which were black. But mostly he was my favorite because he would let me come right up to him, like I had now, and he liked me. At least I think he does.

"Never got to go out again, did we?" said Daryl, leaning against the doorway.

I didn't get what he meant so I just shrugged and pat Memphis' neck.

"You got a horse right here, could go ridin' right now if ya want."

That sounded great, except for one important thing.

"I don't know how."

I'll remember every detail of the stable during that moment; the way the sun was scatter on the dirt, coming in from the doors, the faint chirping of birds outside, how Memphis nudged my cheek with his velvety nose, because Daryl said something that I'll probably never forget as long as I live.

"Wanna learn?"

* * *

Author's note: Tune in next time for the learning and Oh, Sophia. She says she doesn't have a lot to say but she does.

I've been so excited to write this chapter, and I know you've all been curious

Thanks to all who dropped me a line, I really enjoy reading what you have to say about this story and I'm glad the humor landed well because I want ; _I luv ewansmile, Kountry101, SilverWolf84, LawlessResolute, Crystal, Emeberka-2012, h8erade, HGRHfan35, Rodgerse, BanannaFlvdSnow. _

Sophia's intuition about Daryl getting angry because he feels useless when Lori was hinting her gender roles at Andrea is a trait of abused kids that I read about in an article. Children in such circumstances develop a sensitivity to people's moods to know when to make themselves scarce.

The question from _The Yearling_ is an actually question that I pulled from my copy.

Happy Canada Long Weekend, everybody!


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